FAITH WILDING

May 18, 2025

All images courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to ask you how it all began, because you grew up in a pacifist commune in Paraguay alongside German Jewish and European war refugees driven out of Germany by the Nazis. In this commune in Paraguay, how did you come to art, or how did art come to you?

FAITH WILDING That’s a long story (laughs). So, the Bruderhof [an evangelical Christian pacifist movement founded in Germany in 1920], basically fled Germany because of the Nazi occupation in 1938, and they went to England. My parents were English, and my father—who was a conscientious objector [in World War II]— heard of this commune, which was also an anti-war commune. So, he joined and so did my mother, to whom he was engaged. Two months after they joined, which was in early 1941, the whole commune was thrown out by the British. The only country that would take them and allow them to continue their way of life, and worship, was Paraguay. So, all of these Europeans went to Paraguay and they bought a big piece of land there. Most of them were academics—they knew nothing about agriculture, or living off the land. But they learned fast. Everything was done by hand and they grew all their food. I was born in 1943—a war baby. I grew up there and went to school there. We were trilingual: Spanish, English and German, which is also a huge advantage. I had this really interesting international upbringing in the middle of Paraguay. And most of us immigrated to the United States in 1961. So then, I started going to college there and I left the commune. I became very involved in the anti-war movement. I had been actually planning to leave the commune for a long time because it was too confining for me. I was always extremely interested in making art. We did a lot of art in the commune, a lot of craft. I can make clothes, I can weave mats. We used a lot of materials that were just growing there—palm leaves and banana leaves. I was very stimulated as a child by the environment, by nature. I was a very big reader as a child.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to ask you about the reading, because you grew up in this religious community, and at the same time there were books. Early on, you found your heroines, mostly women like Virginia Woolf and George Sand.

Faith Wilding: I think my mother was a good model for me too, because she was really kind of a feminist. Although, you know, she had to hide it. I was always struggling against the very stern, very male religious things that went on. I was interested in bodies. I had really close girlfriends. So when I came to the States, I made a lot of friends when I went to college, and most of them were women. After I got married, we moved to Fresno and I met Suzanne Lacy. By that time, it was the late sixties. Suzanne and I started a feminist group in Fresno at the university. It grew from two people at the beginning to about 50 people. We had done a lot of research on whatever feminist material we could find. We were also doing consciousness raising. That's when Judy Chicago decided to come to Fresno. She didn't know us, but she wanted to start some kind of a feminist art program at the university. So, somebody sent her to me. I introduced it to Suzanne right away too. I worked with her on organizing the first feminist, all-women class at the university. And we found our own space, which was a huge, old warehouse that had been a community theater. We all had little studios in there, and a large area where we could do performance. It was an incredible kind of freedom because we felt safe. We were encouraging each other, we were excited. We had some open house events where lots of women came from San Francisco, and some from Los Angeles.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to hear about Virginia Woolf because I think a lot of what came after in your work, and all these pioneering feminist works, and Womanhouse, I think it all began somehow with your childhood—with Virginia Woolf.

Faith Wilding: I guess what drew me to Virginia Woolf is her language. A Room Of One's Own, of course, was super important politically—this idea that we have to have our own space. I had experienced this with the feminist program in Fresno. And it was particularly important for me because of growing up in the commune, where I never had my own space. I always had to share the room with three or four other people and everything we did in the commune was done in a group. It was frowned upon to go off in a corner and do your own thing. You were always supposed to be with the community. I was very jealous of Virginia Woolf because I felt that she had a kind of freedom. I read a great deal of British literature, and adventure stories, but mostly it was about women, and women's lives, and women's novels. I was just very drawn to that as a child because I was trying to figure out what my life was going to be. Because here I was in Paraguay going to college in the capital city of Asunción. But I only went through one year of college there because the commune decided to move everybody to America. In the US, they sent me to high school and I was totally bummed out because I was ninerteen and I was already going to college. I ended up in the home ec room because they thought I was dumb. I'm like, this is what you do at school—you learn how to clean your clothes and bake bread?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST:: Jane Eyre was also important for you, no?

Faith Wilding: I know that book forward and backward. It’s extremely romantic, right? She was an orphan and she made her own way. She was so extremely convinced of what she had to do. That impressed me so much. Mr. Rochester was extremely romantic to me too. Of course, I read up on the Brontë sisters and they led really amazing, and, in many ways, tragic lives, but these were models for me, models of very productive writers and thinkers. Even though they were in very difficult circumstances, they were really out of their time too, in a certain way. They were sort of in the middle of nowhere, but they managed to get some kind of view of the world, and of their own independence. That had a very deep influence on me—that you could be independent, because that was not what I learned in the commune.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And this independence, of course, leads us to another woman who inspired you a lot, and who I've been studying—the one and only 12th-century Benedictine abbess, Hildegard von Bingen from Germany. She was many things: a scientist, a composer, she was of course a religious figure, a mystic, a healer—she was also a philosopher. She had these epiphanies and these incredible visions. I think more and more, in terms of the extinction crisis and the environmental crisis, she's being revisited as one of the earliest environmentalists. I know that she has inspired your drawings. When did you come across her? Did this also start in your childhood?

“Yes, what fascinated me was that she knew so much about the female body. She even writes about the female orgasm. She doesn't call it an orgasm, but the way she describes it, it's an orgasm.”

- Wilding

Faith Wilding: In the commune, yes. Somewhere there was a book that was called Mystik deutscher Frauen im Mittelalter. It's about a lot of these mystics, like Hildegard von Bingen. I have done my pilgrimage to Hildegard's nunnery, which is just across the Rhine. I have spoken to her nuns. She had this thing about greenness—she calls it viriditas, “the green power.” The greenness that is basically life. In the 12th-century, she's talking about how nature is dying; nature is being overcome by human greed, and we have to protect nature. She was a fighter for nature. She also composed music. I've made artwork inspired by her.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And also a radio play. Can you talk about that?

Faith Wilding: My ex-husband was working a lot in public radio at the time. And so I made a radio play, where I basically visit Hildegard von Bingen and have a conversation with her—with me as a young child and her as a wise woman. I wove in the way I grew up in South America with how she grew up, which was very different. But we are united in our love of nature and our very fierce desire to help nature; to work with nature rather than to destroy nature. It was produced in Cologne, Germany. It was broadcast a couple of times. And then I did it in English on public radio here in the USA.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You also made paintings, like “Woman clothed in the sun” (1985), which is a portrait of Hildegard of Bingen.

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Faith Wilding: Yes, what fascinated me was that she knew so much about the female body. She even writes about the female orgasm. She doesn't call it an orgasm, but the way she describes it, it's an orgasm. I'm like, cool, very cool. This is a nun, right? She’s been in a nunnery since she was six years old and she's writing about what women can feel. And it's well known that the nuns danced, they put on garlands of flowers, and they did these festive performances in the church. She was excommunicated for a while because of the people she was friends with. Her nuns were very free. When she was excommunicated, she was told that she couldn't pray.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You kept coming back to Hildegard—you did works like Angel of history (2018). In the eighties, you did Propagations: Hildegard and I (1981). It's sort of a mix between trees, and bodies, and plants. It's not about separation from nature.It's about connection.

Faith Wilding: And also about survival in a certain way—how we’re incredibly dependent on nature at the same time as we're killing nature. And that's the kind of thing Hildegard is pointing out too. And it started way back there in the 12th-century—she was an eco person way back then. People saw the effects humans were having on nature.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Because they saw the beginnings of this colonial separation and of the extractive economy. And her work saw this necessity for a communion more than separation, which makes it so relevant for today. Also when we talk about the orgasm, one can say Hildegard almost anticipated what you and Suzanne Lacey did with your consciousness raising group. Don't you think?

Faith Wilding: You know, that’s interesting, because people came to Hildegard from all over, and very high-standing people. She talked to the Pope, she talked to the local king and prince, and she would talk to anybody. People came to her to ask, “How shall we live?” Just like they used to ask Jesus. “How should we live?” And she dictated all of her work because apparently she had terrible migraine headaches. She had all these visions. But she gave me a lot of courage, because she was really brave in what she was doing—she spent her whole life doing this.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: She was excommunicated and had her own monastery. That idea of actually making one's own monastery brings us in a way to Womanhouse, because it's interesting that you co-created your own structure, which is radical and now celebrated in Los Angeles in a new exhibition. Do you remember the day Womanhouse was invented?How was this idea born?

Faith Wilding: Well, CalArts had just been founded in LA. Judy Chicago’s best friend at the time was Miriam Schapiro, the wife of the head of the art department of CalArts. So, she persuaded her husband to invite Judy Chicago and six or so of her students from Fresno to come to CalArts, and start a feminist program there, which was very radical, of course. Then, an earthquake happened and the newly-built CalArts, and all of its floors were damaged, which meant we couldn't occupy CalArts in the fall semester. So, we were meeting in various places in the city of Los Angeles, and then our art historian, Paula Harper said, “Why don't we make a project in a house?” And that's how Womanhouse was born. So, we looked for abandoned houses and CalArts actually owned this old house, or somebody had been connected to this old house, and we got it for $2. It was pretty messed up—not a single toilet worked, all the glass windows were broken, but it was quite a large house, two stories. The first couple months of Womanhouse was just restoring it enough so that we could actually use it. And it never gets super cold in LA, but it was pretty cold because it was February, and there was no heating. There were maybe twenty people who were interested in working with Womanhouse. Some of them were from the Fresno program. Suzanne didn't join because she wanted to be in the design program at CalArts. But she was, of course, very connected to all of us. Every week, we went through consciousness raising—going around the circle and talking about our experiences as children and how we connect to the house, and to the idea of a woman's place in the house, and what making a home is. A lot of stuff came out because people have all kinds of different experiences connected to houses and homes. There was a lot of crying and acknowledgement—it's a big topic. Home is a big topic.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Was Luchita Hurtado part of the group?

Faith Wilding: She wasn't really part of the group, but she did come in, as did a couple of other artists, to do certain things. Betye Saar met with us. It was a really great chance for us to also meet up with these women artists in LA. I'm still connected to some of them, which is really great.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You did two very legendary works at Womanhouse. You did the Waiting performance—an almost Beckettian performance about waiting, but very different from Beckett. And then you also did an installation called Womb Room. Can you tell me about these two works? What kind of reaction did they get?

Faith Wilding: Yeah, well we had a performance group that Judy Chicago led. Because that was our plan from the beginning—that we would do some performances as part of the house. I was at dinner with Arlene [Raven] and Judy one night and suddenly I was like, I wanna do something about waiting —about what we've waited for, what I've waited for all my life. And so we started making a list. I still have that list. And so out of that, I crafted the “Waiting” monologue, which we worked on as a group; other people tried out how they would perform the piece. But you know, I have given permission to anybody who wants to perform it, and lots of people have performed it all over the world in all different kinds of ways, which I think is really cool. Then the other piece—I wanted to make a really primitive, simple dwelling, like a tent. In the commune, we did a lot of needle work and I could knit anything. I could sew anything, I could crochet anything. So I decided to crochet it. That was a really adventurous thing because I'd never crocheted anything huge like that, and something that was really sort of architectural. I had to figure out how to make really thick rope into a sort of net that would hold together, and people loved it. People would come in—other students while they were working on their work—and they would lie down inside it, look up, and rest a little bit. However the work was stolen, so the original Womb Room does not exist anymore.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And obviously, since then you have created so many bodies of work, and you very often work in bigger series, for example, the Wall of Wounds (1996). This is a series of one hundred Rorschach prints, which are all about a different wound: sexual wounds, political wounds. Can you tell me about the epiphany of the wounds and how you work in series?

Faith Wilding: I started thinking about the many kinds of wounds that most of us carry. And how does one represent that? That's what the Rorschach is all about—you can read things into it. I like that idea because a lot of the wounds are internal—they're the wounds of the mind, or wounds of the spirit. And who knows what form they really have. I sold them for $50 a Wound, but I also gave a lot of Wounds away. Some bought like ten or fifteen Wounds. It does seem to have echoed in people's minds. Right now I'm drawing trees. Really big drawings in graphite of trees with no leaves. They look like old monsters. They're amazing because where I live, there's all of these huge old oak trees, and elm trees, that have been standing there for over a hundred years. Now that it's winter, I can see their forms and they're just like survivors—they've seen so much life.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You also do research for some of your series, like for the Paraguay series. Of course, you needed to then go to Paraguay again, so that it became an embodied experience. But you also say that it was not about nostalgia—it’s about memory. I mean, we live in the age of more and more information, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have more memory. Amnesia is at the core of this digital age. It's also a very political work because it's about an exploited country with a very impoverished population, with an extractive, capitalist economy that destroys the environment. Can you talk a little bit about this very important body of work?

Faith Wilding: It was difficult, I hardly slept. I found it very depressing. I stayed with a family that I knew. We traveled a little bit to some of the places that I'd been to, like one of the lakes. The whole time I felt like I shouldn't have come back. I felt like time had stood still in a way. There were some changes, but they just didn’t seem to be the right changes. I felt very alienated actually, and I don't know if that was a good idea. I was pretty much in the capital city Ascención, because I couldn't travel by myself down the river and into places where I had actually grown up.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I mean, it’s almost like an oxymoron because the works are supposed to be mournful, but they're also angry. So, there are two forces in a way. Later on, there were also the Battle Dresses (1995-97) that were inspired by the women in former Yugoslavia who were raped. You also did the Armor Series (1991–94), which is another important series of work. In all these series, there seems to be this mourning, but also anger or protest.

Faith Wilding: Right. As a child, I read all of King Arthur. I mean, here I was in a pacifist commune and I'm completely crazy about knights in armor. Armor is obviously a physical thing, but it's also a psychological thing. I spent some time in Nuremberg, and they have the best collection of 10th and 11th-century armor. Every day I would go look at this armor and try to understand it. They are pieces of art in a certain way. They are beautifully decorated, a lot of them, especially the king's armor. And it’s this weird kind of metal body. I've always been very interested in all kinds of forms of the body. The many different ways in which the body appears to us. And so the armor, as a body, is a metaphor. But also, my father was a conscientious objector. I grew up in a commune that was completely anti-war. So, I had to sort of explore war, which was seen as evil in my childhood. It's sort of like, I need to know both sides. And, of course, the romance that is wound around these deadly things. War is not romantic, it's deadly.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There is also the Embryoworlds (1997-98), and there is the work exploring cyborgs and recombinants—the intersection between humans, animals, and plants. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how it's also now evolving with this current moment of the metaverse where cyborgs also play a big role. You have engaged with technology a lot—you're part of a collective called subRosa where you work with these new technologies in relation to the body, but in very tactical ways.

Faith Wilding: I'm really ignorant about how the actual machinery works. That's not my part. I think a lot about the ideas. The Embryoworlds—because there are so many issues about female fertility and what's happening with female fertility, subRosa was doing a lot of research about that and the embryos, on what they can and could become, or not become. I'm really interested in things that are becoming things. And the recombinants are partly about this also. Most of us are connected to machines all the time. I'm connected to a machine right now. What is this doing to us? How far does the body extend? Our flesh bodies have a certain amount of space and volume and that's it, but because of these machines we can extend our bodies. That gives people a lot of power. They can extend their body and what they do in the world without actually leaving home. I'd rather leave home and take my body with me into the world. But the virtual experience is not my friend for the most part. I mean, the imaginative experience is definitely my friend, but I think that's different from the virtual experience.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: It’s interesting because you grew up in a collective and you were in this commune with your parents, but then your practice always had a collective dimension, like with Womanhouse. So it's interesting how that kept continuing. Can you tell us about today and how your collective works now? Does your group have a manifesto?

Faith Wilding: (Laughs) I'll have to check. There's only two of us in the group. Hyla Willis lives in Pittsburgh. So, I would have to email and ask if we have a manifesto. We used to have a manifesto and I think it's in the subRosa book.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Many young artists are inspired by your work—by your performances, by your installations, by your drawings, but also by your activism. You were recently interviewed about activism and you said there are actually two models right now for activism. One is a kind of direct action against specific targets. And the other one is more exploratory, whose goal is to create interventions and disturbances into the public spectacle, but also disturbances into biotech or bioinformatic systems.

Faith Wilding: I'm a teacher and I definitely talk to students about that. I think that's one way in which I can still be active. But mostly I'm doing artwork and I'm trying to put some of my ideas and thinking into that work. But it's not as activist, shall we say, as many of the other things that I've done in my life.

Faith Wilding, courtesy the artist andAnat Ebgi, Los Angeles

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Do you have unrealized projects?

Faith Wilding: I have never thought about that. I mean, some things that subRosa really wanted to do we never did. I really wanted subRosa to go to South America. We didn't really succeed in doing that. So, I would have to think about an unrealized project. Right now I'm drawing trees, that's where I'm at, and I don't know what that's going to lead to.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Also, I was wondering—Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a little book that was full of advice for a young poet. What is your advice to a young artist today?

Faith Wilding: My advice to young artists is to keep working, because you just don't know what's going to come out. That's the way I go at it. I just keep working.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And of course, you work not only with visual art, but you are also a writer. I saw a fantastic conversation between you and Lucy Lippard, whom I've known for a long time. I wanted to ask what writing means in relation to your practice, and a little bit about the epiphany that led to the book you wrote, By our own hands [The woman artist's movement, Southern California, 1970-1976].

Faith Wilding: People have begged me to write my autobiography. There's pieces of it here and there, but why should I write my autobiography? I mean, who cares really? But I might, you never know. But that's a lot of work—a lot of work.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Do you have any projects that faced censorship?

Faith Wilding: That's an interesting thought. There's a few things I've done that people have not liked to see. Galleries have not wanted to hang shows up. And I can't really think of what that might be at the moment—you seem to have a much better grasp of what I've done than I do (laughs). You've been doing your homework. I think I would like to do a book in which I just kind of ramble around and show a lot of pictures, but don't hold me to it.

WHO IS CHARLI XCX?

May 11, 2025

Hair: Matt Benns, Makeup: Rommy Najor, Styling Assistance: Amy Bialek

Born Charlotte Emma Aitchison in Cambridge and raised in Essex, Charli XCX is one of those rare superstars that defies genre categorization. She sways effortlessly between the experimental and the mainstream, the serious and the irreverent. Her rise, and rise, and rise, since releasing the first demo via Myspace in 2008 at the age of fourteen, has proven that a particular indistinct classification may be the key to her success. But who is Charli XCX? Pop star or performance artist? We enlisted her closest friends and collaborators to offer clues through quotes, tweets, and behind-the-scenes photos. On the occasion of Charli’s upcoming album, BRAT, a follow-up to her 2022 chart-topping album CRASH, Hans Ulrich Obrist examines the artist’s inspirations and solicits her advice for younger generations.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST How are you?

CHARLI XCX I am good, thanks. How are you?

OBRIST I'm good. I'm very excited to finally meet. We have so many friends in common. Where are you?

CHARLI XCX I'm in an Uber in South London and I'm going to East London. I imagine that you know my friend Matt Copson.

OBRIST Yes, I know Matt Copson and Caroline Polachek. I'm going to tell them that we met. They will be excited.

CHARLI XCX Nice, nice. Cool.

OBRIST I wanted to begin with the beginning. How did you come to music or how did music come to you—because you started so early? Was there an epiphany?

CHARLI XCX I think the reason I wanted to make music was because I wanted to be cool, really. I always just felt like such a loser. Also, I was enthralled by certain artists who I loved on Myspace. I was just at home in the countryside, living out this fantasy life through other artists that I would listen to on Myspace. I wanted to make music in the way that they made music; that made me feel like I was living in a film. And so, I just started trying. At first, I failed terribly because I wasn't really a producer. I didn't have an understanding of sound or anything, but I knew that I was trying to capture this feeling of excitement. The feeling of listening to music in the back of a car, and looking out the window, and immediately feeling like I was in a music video. I was always very against the idea of needing music to survive. But now, the older I get, the more I need music to keep me sane and functioning. It does really help me air out a lot of anger and emotion that I have.

OBRIST In all art forms, the future is sometimes invented with fragments from the past—we stand on the shoulders of giants. I read that Björk inspired you. Also, Britney Spears. I am wondering if there are other musical artists, but also artists from other disciplines, that have inspired you.

CHARLI XCX What I've learned about myself recently, particularly during the making of this record, is that I'm not actually that inspired by music. I'm inspired by the careers of artists like Björk. I'm inspired by her position in culture—what she has done for female auteurs in music. She carved a lane for herself and has been really defiant in the choices that she makes. I'm inspired by Britney because I'm fascinated by pop culture. I like looking at pop music and pop culture through the lens of society. That's the thing that gets me really amped up. Lyrically, I adore Lou Reed because he was looking at all of these people in New York—these amazing characters who were so fueled by drug culture, punk culture, by the culture of fame—and he was writing this incredible poetry about them. I think I write my lyrics from that same perspective. I went to art school at Slade [School of Fine Arts], but I dropped out after a year. I was always gravitating towards performance artists. I also really liked Alex Bag and Pipilotti Rist.

OBRIST In an interview recently, you mentioned that music isn't as important as artistry; a great artist is more than the songs they make, it's the culture they inhabit. That’s, of course, the case with Björk, whom I met in the ’90s when I was a student. I went to her gig at Rote Fabrik in Zurich, which is a totally alternative space. And then, a few years later, she was super mainstream. But she never stopped experimenting. With your work, I feel like there is a similar oscillation.

CHARLI XCX There is this pendulum within me that swings from caring about commerciality to not caring about it at all. And then, there is this thing where I gravitate only to what I love. I love Britney Spears, but I also love Trash Humpers (2010) by Harmony Korine. He's interesting because he plays with pop culture in a very glossy magazine type of way. And I like high and low. I think that's what I was actually trying to do at art school when I was there. I was putting pop music in a more traditional space. A lot of the people that I was at school with were interested in classical painting and I just wasn't at all. But it was fun to play in that realm with pop music and literally sing Britney Spears songs in my crits next to people doing these huge fucking canvases that were always brown, which bothered me.

[Charli’s phone cuts out]

OBRIST Hello? Can you hear me? I lost you.

[Fifteen minutes later]

CHARLI XCX Hello? Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I just went through a tunnel and then my phone just gave up on me, but I think I'm back now.

OBRIST No problem. We’ll do the interview in different parts. (laughs) It's now part two. So, where are you now?

CHARLI XCX I'm now in East London. So, part two is in East London. (laughs)

OBRIST I wanted to talk about collaboration. I have been doing studio visits with visual artists lately and everybody has these amazing collaborations going on. And your new album is a continuation of these amazing collaborations you’ve had for a long time, whether it’s Caroline Polachek, Kim Petras, or Troye Sivan, and your very special collaborations with SOPHIE.

CHARLI XCX Collaboration, in general, has always been really important to me. When I was younger, I was very much searching for this crew of artists that I wanted to surround myself with. I felt like a lot of the people who I was looking to, whether it was artists signed to Ed Banger Records, there were this group of people who were working separately, but also collaborating and weaving in and out of each other's worlds. I was searching for that for myself, but never really found it. So, I kind of realized, okay, maybe I have to sort of create this for myself. And it was only when I met A. G. Cook, and I saw he was doing a similar thing with PC Music that I felt like, okay, we have a very similar outlook about the way that music can be made. You can bring your friends in, you can work with other artists really in a very low-stakes way without ego—just because it's fun, and I began doing that. Caroline, for example, is someone who I've collaborated with a lot and we work in possibly the most polar opposite way, but it works. She is so detail-oriented and in the weeds. The way I work is very instinctive and spontaneous, but then I literally will never revise a single thing. Whereas Caroline is such a perfectionist. It's fun to work with her because she makes me think about things that I wouldn't normally think about.

There is one song, in particular, on the upcoming album that is about SOPHIE. And that song is about my dealing with the grief and guilt around her passing. She has obviously been such a huge inspiration in my creative process across the board. I think this album is a kind of homage to club culture as a whole. And, of course, she was an extremely big part of my experience of club culture along with many other artists, including A. G. Cook and a lot of French electro artists like Mr. Oizo, Uffie, and Justice. But while this record is about club culture and partying, it’s a very brutalist take on that. It’s very raw, confrontational, and in your face. What all of the artists have in common, which can be felt through this record for me, is this element of confidence and commitment to doing exactly what you feel in a very fearless way. That's something that SOPHIE was always encouraging, not just with me, but all of the people that she worked with.

OBRIST You said that in the previous album, you were moving away from hyperpop. Is the new album moving further away? How would you describe the music of the new album?

CHARLI XCX I don't pay too much attention to genres. To me, it's a club record. I understand that some people need to define the music. There are some pop songs on the record, but this is stuff that I would play in a club. It’s very much electronic. It's very much dance music. It's abstract in some ways, but in other ways, it's very tangible. There are elements of it that are super repetitive, but then there are also these really kind of blossoming, flowing melodies. It's my take on club music.

OBRIST Do you have any unrealized collaborations or projects?

CHARLI XCX I have so many. (laughs) Firstly, the fans don't know it yet—I guess once they read this interview, they will—I am releasing a lot of my demos that won't make it to the album and playing them at my shows, at my DJ sets. Just to show that there are a lot of tracks that don't make it—not because they’re bad (in fact, some of them are really good), it's just that they don't fit with the record. I'm into the idea of this massive amount of material being out there, saturating the fan base with all of these things that could have possibly happened. In terms of other projects outside of music—I acted in my first film last year, called Faces of Death. And that has spun a wheel for me. I was very afraid to explore that side of myself for quite a long time, but now I really want to act. And that put me in this zone of writing a script. Also, I went to Italy for six weeks to write my book, but then I ended up just drinking Aperol spritzes all day, every day, and chain-smoking cigarettes. I think I wrote the beginnings of two chapters and then gave up (laughs). But there are a lot of projects. Right now, there's this film I'm beginning to formulate in my brain, and that's probably my biggest project that hasn't been realized yet, but I'm hopeful that it will be.

“That's what good music does. You can be as clever as you want, but the important thing about art, in general, is the feeling and conviction.” - Charli XCX

OBRIST I'm really interested in the connection between music, literature, and poetry. I just had a long discussion with Lana Del Rey a few weeks ago. Lana, of course, wrote this very beautiful poetry book. In a recent interview, you mentioned books by writers like Rachel Cusk, so I am interested in your connection to literature. And do you write poetry?

CHARLI XCX You know, I don't write poetry. I mean maybe some people would say that song lyrics are poetry, but I tend to think of poetry in a more traditional way. And I don't feel that I'm a poet in the way that a lot of people would call Lana Del Rey a poet. I don't feel that I'm operating in that same sphere. But I think my favorite author of all time is Natasha Stagg. I really like the energy of her writing—it just feels very visceral but very blunt at the same time, which I absolutely love. When I'm reading her essays, I feel like I'm in a conversation with her. That’s my favorite kind of writing, those are my favorite kind of song lyrics. It's why I love Lou Reed's lyrics. I feel like he's talking to me, and it's why I really feel quite strongly about the lyrics on this record that I've just made. They feel like I'm texting my friends. If I was ever gonna write this book, I think it really would feel like a kind of group chat, like a flurry of iMessages. (laughs)

OBRIST Now the topic of this issue is levity, which has to do with high spirits, but also vivacity, which has to do with one of my favorite virtues, which is energy. Your work is so full of energy. Can you talk a little bit about what the word levity means to you and its connection to pop music? Do you think that music can bring levity to people in the form of positivity or optimism, as opposed to doom?

CHARLI XCX It's funny, when we were shooting the images, everybody was saying the word levity a lot. The stylist, the photographer, everybody was sort of saying, “Remember levity.” Which is sort of funny because I don't smile in pictures. And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, totally—it's in my head, but it's not coming out of my face.” There is such a joy to music and a lightness to the feeling that it often brings people. Even when I get so bogged down by the theory behind what I'm doing, like the reason I make my album cover, the things I say, my lyrics, and the production choices, at the end of the day, I gravitate towards all of it is because it's fun and it makes me feel something. That's what good music does. You can be as clever as you want, but the important thing about art, in general, is the feeling and conviction.

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OBRIST Caroline Polachek works a lot with Matt Copson who created these gorgeous volcano visuals. Musicians often use visual art, or do visual art for their stage sets, or for music videos. I’m curious about your own visual art and also your collaborations with visual artists.

CHARLI XCX On this record, and the past few albums, I've been working with Imogene Strauss on building out the entire visual world. Sometimes we'll go super in-depth with another collaborator. For example, the music video I made for my first single from this record, “Von Dutch,” was something I worked on with Torso. I had this idea for it, and I knew they could pull it off because their camera work is so intricate. I filmed little pieces of it on my iPhone and would send them to them. I would put the phone on the ground and walk over it—demonstrating to them exactly how I wanted it. The album cover, for example, was made on my iPhone in June of last year. I don't use Photoshop. When it comes to computers, I'm not very skilled at all. So, I made the cover with this app on my phone. We went through a million different iterations of this green square that had the word ‘brat’ on it with this design company called SPECIAL OFFER, inc. Eventually, we just came back to the version that I made on my phone. But I enjoy sharing things with my friends and going back and forth with them, even if they're not really in the art world. That's fun to me. Also, I’m sharing music with people who don’t have anything to do with music. Getting opinions on music from visual people, like photographers, is interesting. And getting visual opinions from musicians is more fun.

OBRIST When I was about sixteen, I started to curate and visit art studios. But I was so lucky to have these mentors who gave me advice. And you, of course, started even earlier. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this book, which is advice to a young poet. A lot of young people are going to read this interview. Given your huge amount of experience, I am wondering what kind of advice you would give to someone who might be sixteen today and wants to be an artist or a musician.

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CHARLI XCX I would say, there’s no rush to create. You have your whole life to create and maybe you'll make your best work when you are fifteen years old, but maybe you'll make your best work when you are ninety-five. There's no peak in creativity. Obviously, in pop music, especially for women, there is unfortunately this kind of time bomb on age, this myth that women are at their peak at a particular age. But I don't agree with that and I think it’s changing—it’s just an awful trait of the industry that still lingers over us. But it's not true. I mean, it doesn't matter how old you are, you can still create great work from a really unique perspective as long as your perspective is interesting and as long as you're true to yourself. There's no timeline for creativity. When you are ready, you’ll know it deep within you; when you feel the most confident and fearless. But that also takes a lot of trial and error. You have to work your craft in whatever you're doing.

“I don’t think you know that you're going to be part of a cultural moment before a cultural moment happens. Otherwise, it probably wouldn't be one.” - Charli XCX

OBRIST That's great advice. Today, we had a conversation here with Alex Israel, another friend we have in common. He was saying how important it is when he makes a feature film or does an AI project for a big brand like BMW, his art can reach many more people than just through the visual art world. And that's also true for music—for example, when you did that amazing song for Barbie (2023). You reach hundreds of millions of people who might otherwise not encounter your work. So, I wanted to ask you about that as a strategy to reach many different worlds and bring people together. I think the world is too fragmented and separated, and we need to bring things together now.

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CHARLI XCX It's interesting. I actually didn't really have a strategy, but it's totally smart to think of it like that. I’ve known Mark Ronson for a long time—he reached out to me and said, “There's this driving scene in Barbie. Greta Gerwig thought of you, do you wanna do it?” And was like, “Yeah, sure.” But in my head, even though at that point they had Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, and Billie [Eilish] on the soundtrack, I still wasn't thinking, oh this would be a smart thing for me to do. Even though Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are in it—and Greta Gerwig is directing. I was just like, okay, I love doing driving songs. I can do that. And I like Barbie and driving scenes—that’s the only reason why I did it. It didn't feel like this high-pressure, massive, multimillion-dollar budget movie thing. It felt like me and EASYFUN, who I made the song with at my boyfriend's flat in Hackney, making this song in forty-five minutes and then him spilling coffee over the white sofa before he left. That was the day. And then, it comes out and it catches fire, and you're like, Oh my god. I'm part of this cultural moment. I don’t think you know that you're going to be part of a cultural moment before a cultural moment happens. Otherwise, it probably wouldn't be one.

OBRIST We haven't spoken yet about you as a DJ. I was in Milan and Erykah Badu was DJing at a Bottega Veneta event. She makes music and does concerts, so it was really interesting to see her DJing. Recently, your Boiler Room DJ set went viral. Can you tell our readers and me what it means for you to DJ?

CHARLI XCX It's one of my favorite things. I actually hate going to live shows; I just love watching DJs. I grew up listening to 2manydjs and Soulwax mixtapes, and it would always just make me feel so alive. And the sound quality—listening to a DJ is always better. It makes me feel so much when I see a good DJ playing good records and controlling the crowd with their own choice of music. It makes me wanna party and get fucked up. But also, I don't need to do that if I'm watching a really good DJ because I just feel so elated and in the zone. It is totally joyous for me and I love it when I get to do it. And the Boiler Room thing, I was definitely very nervous because there were a lot of cameras in our faces, but we had a really good time.

OBRIST Amazing. Thank you so much. It was such a great conversation. I really hope we can meet in person. I can show you our shows at the Serpentine and maybe have a coffee.

CHARLI XCX I would love that.

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ENJOY THE SILENCE

May 11, 2025

Photographs:Kuba Ryniewicz, Styling: Anita Szymczak, Grooming: Olivia Cochrane using fjör skincare and Davines hair care

Max Richter is one of contemporary classical music's most revolutionary and innovative composers, known for his sociopolitical awareness. His film and television scores are instantly recognizable for their emotional depth, impact, and poignancy. Richter has also arranged music for art exhibitions, ballets, and runway shows, including a longstanding collaboration with Dior Men’s artistic director, Kim Jones. Among his numerous albums, one of his most ambitious works, Sleep, is an 8-hour composition designed in collaboration with neuroscientists to be experienced during slumber. His ninth studio album, In A Landscape (Decca Records)—an ode to the extremes of nature, love, and the polarity of existence—marks the first solo record produced at Studio Richter Mahr, a creative audio laboratory in Oxfordshire that he co-founded with his wife, Yulia Mahr. The studio also serves as a residency for emerging musicians. Released in early September, the album revisits themes first explored in The Blue Notebooks, written in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and described by Richter as a “meditation on violence.” Richter’s new album, which wavers between electronic and acoustic sounds, is a moving soundtrack for a new era of uncertainty and chaos.

MAX RICHTER Hi, how are you?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I'm good, and you?

RICHTER I'm good.

OBRIST Where are you?

RICHTER I am in my studio in Oxfordshire.

OBRIST I was talking with your friend Nico Muhly, and he mentioned Studio Richter Mahr as a great example of a residency for musicians. Can you describe how it works?

RICHTER Yulia Mahr and I conceived this studio as a multidimensional laboratory. It functions as an instrument for us to deliver our own work into the world. We also felt that we should make it available to other practitioners who may not have the opportunity to work in these facilities in their everyday lives—artists who are mostly in the early stages of their careers. We've had quite an informal kind of a process where we invite people to come for a couple of weeks, or whatever it might be, and give them the facilities and accommodations for free. There is no agenda. There is no expectation. There are no hoops to jump through. It's simply providing a platform or a context for them to make work. It’s rooted in thinking back to when we were starting—when I was starting out—having no resources. You are very limited. You can make music on a piece of manuscript paper, but you can’t do anything in terms of recording or putting the work out into the world unless you have some resources.

OBRIST You mentioned that the space is like your instrument. Can you talk about what that entails—from the technology to the acoustics?

RICHTER Music can now be made on the computer. You can sit in your bedroom, and you can make a record. However, if you want to use acoustic instrumentation, you need a space to record. And that’s where the roadblock comes for people just starting because that is expensive. We also have the opportunity to record and mix in sound formats, like [Dolby] Atmos, a new language we’re exploring in this space. You need a lot of very specific equipment to do that. So, this is really about providing the best possible recording scenario for people who want to explore their work in a kind of optimal condition.

OBRIST Suzanne Pagé, the visionary director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, who was my mentor and a great friend, told me you were invited to make a sonic component for Mark Rothko's retrospective. So many creatives in art, music, and literature are inspired by Rothko. How did you come to know about the work of Mark Rothko? What does the work mean to you, and why do you think revisiting his legacy today is particularly relevant?

RICHTER Like most people who are London-based, the room at the Tate on Millbank with the Seagram Murals made a tremendous impact. This goes back to my teen years. Encountering that work in that space and the way it seemed to relate to and contrast with everything else that was going on in the building in such a profound way. It was an experience that prompted a lot of reflection on my part about what art can do. I’d been introduced, via a very circuitous route, to the minimalists as really quite a young kid. My experience of seeing Rothko chimed in with that. It seemed to reinforce this view of, as he says, “Complex ideas expressed simply.” This was aspirational for me—how could you convey something nuanced and sophisticated and rich, but make it feel simple?

OBRIST Complexity and simplicity—all great things in art are often oxymoronic.

RICHTER Exactly. Yes. And the works set up this sort of dialogue; they ask quite a lot from you. There’s some sort of conversation, which the work elicits from you directly, because it’s not flooding you with data. One of the most interesting things he said was, “Silence is so accurate.” If you put Rothko and Arvo Pärt together, that makes sense. It’s quite historical, reduced, and minimal. And I think that's one of the things that I really enjoy about Rothko’s work: it’s asking fundamental questions.

OBRIST It’s interesting that there are these possibilities for exhibitions to have soundtracks. Alex Poots and I worked on this commission where Gerhard Richter made works related to the music of Arvo Pärt, and Arvo Pärt made music for Richter. And it was all brought together in a room, like an exhibition, not a concert. How do visual art and music come together for you?

RICHTER A meeting point between my work and Rothko's work is that he’s inventing a place when he makes a series of paintings. A piece of music is an imaginary landscape, a place you can inhabit. Within my work, the most obvious example of that is Sleep, which is this eight-and-a-half-hour overnight piece. And I see this Rothko project as, in some way, branching out from that. In my mind, this project exists in two parts. The first is more like a sound installation in response to the Rothko’s, which has fluidity. And then, there’s the locked version of the music, which can be performed or recorded.

OBRIST There are dedicated spaces where we can listen to sound—for instance, La Monte Young’s Dream House in New York. More recently, Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) was performed at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I am curious if you have collaborated with living visual artists.

RICHTER This is going back quite a while, but I made some work with Darren Almond. He has a long-running photographic project documenting a mine in Northern Siberia in the Arctic Circle. There is a mountain there, which has, by some fluke, every mineral on Earth. And it’s the most polluted place in Russia. I made some acoustic material to respond to that—mainly from the resonance of these big steel pipelines. We got together through a shared interest in the work of John Cage.

OBRIST For Rothko, “Art is an adventure into unknown worlds which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.”

RICHTER I think every project is ideally a journey into something you don’t know. That’s why it’s interesting to do it. You have a set of assumptions, and you have things you do know, and creative work is going outside of that pool of light into something you don’t know. I’d describe it more like an enquiry, or a journey. Rothko was quite a troubled man, prone to a lot of anxiety and doubt. We all are, but he sees the idea of making work as risky. It did seem to matter to him very much what people thought. That in itself is risky.

OBRIST Rothko once said, “You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral. Then you should look again. I’m the most violent of all American painters. Behind these colors, there hides the final cataclysm.” Do you agree with that? And was there cataclysm in your sound piece for Mark Rothko?

RICHTER This is why the works affect people so powerfully. It’s very common to wander into the room at Tate Britain and see people just sitting there crying. The works ask the really fundamental human questions.

OBRIST My next question is about your upcoming album, In A Landscape. It’s been described as connecting or reconciling polarities. We are living in a time of the extinction and environmental crisis. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs says, “It’s important to create a situation where we are feeding communion with the environment and go beyond this idea of separation.” Art seems to be one of the most important things right now to reconcile polarities. Can you talk about that and how it articulates itself in the new album?

RICHTER You’re absolutely right. We live in a culture driven by dopamine and cortisol-mediated digital platforms and technology. And so you have, as it is in the UK right now, an amplification of extreme behaviors. This is rooted in people having different points of view. It’s really a very simple thing (laughs). We have a situation now where people with very straightforward, different points of view can no longer have a conversation, but the record is also about polarities in a broader sense. It’s about integrating acoustic instrumentation with electronic music. It’s about reconciling the built environment, the human environment, with a natural environment. We’re trying to find an integrated situation where things can mutually enhance one another rather than get into a polarized, adversarial situation. There’s a long history of artists engaging with the world beyond the urban space and making a fertile connection between creative work and the natural world. For example, Black Mountain College, Ian Hamilton Finlay with Little Sparta, or Derek Jarman at Dungeness Garden.

OBRIST I was just in Salzburg doing this talk with landscape architect Piet Oudolf and artist Tino Sehgal. At CONVOCO!, they were talking about bringing Tino’s “constructed situations” into gardens. That made me think about music in gardens and landscapes, because normally, music is experienced digitally, at home, on mobile devices, or in a concert hall. But are you interested in bringing your work into the landscape as an installation?

RICHTER I have been thinking about that. The title of the record, In A Landscape, is deliberately multidimensional. You can mishear it as “inner landscape,” referring to the world out there or the internal world, and that’s a deliberate and quite nice expression of how I see the process of composing and how it relates to this record. There’s a lineage back to John Cage. He wrote a piece with the same title in the late ’40s, which goes back to his love of [Erik] Satie. Satie is a very important figure in how music and human beings interact. He’s incredibly revolutionary; people dismiss him because the music is so beautiful. But that’s a big mistake. It’s very radical art. Actually, it reminds me of something Hamilton Finlay said about how people think of gardens as retreats, when they are actually attacks. Satie’s music is a bit like that—there’s a tremendous radicalism in it, which feeds into Cage’s anarchistic hinterland.

OBRIST Another project is your collaboration with Kim Jones and Dior. Collaboration between the world of art and fashion is not new. Consider Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, who created the costumes, and [Igor] Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring. Diaghilev worked with artists like Picasso—he brought all these disciplines together. We live in a moment where more and more disciplines are coming together. Just yesterday, I had a wonderful conversation with Luca Guadagnino who was telling me about his collaboration with JW Anderson, who made the costumes for Queer, his new film, which is set to premiere in Venice. So, I’m very interested in your different collaborations with Kim Jones.

RICHTER With Kim, we initially connected via a shared enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. He’s a passionate, lifelong Bloomsbury enthusiast with a very important collection of her writings and first editions. He has that wide-open, inquiring mind, which is so fun to be around and connect with. I do think of his fashion shows as fundamentally creative projects. We collaborated on a runway show inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. We had Gwendoline Christie and Robert Pattinson read sections of The Waste Land—much of it is a two-way conversation. I also contributed some music to that, which was played live. We have continued making pieces in this sort of conversational process. His language is fashion. There’s a sort of fundamental borderlessness in this work: there is movement, there is video and film, there is music, there are the clothes, and there is a kind of theater. The design is always very specific, and you are building a setting for this event. So, it’s very multidimensional. I’m fascinated by the interpenetration and borderlessness of fashion.

“Technology in music is a fascinating historical story. Even early musical systems are technological, but they’re technological from a conceptual level.” - Richter

OBRIST The topic of this magazine issue is the notion of the citizen. What does it mean for you to be a citizen in the 21st century at this very extreme time? Byung-Chul Han has written this beautiful book on hope: “Hope makes action possible even in the midst of the deepest despair because it fuels us with meaning. Hope creates its own insight. It recognizes the yet-not-being.”

RICHTER The notion of the citizen is interesting, being in the UK. I lived in Berlin for ten years, and the notion of the citizen in Germany and the notion of a citizen in the UK are quite different. The UK never really recovered from Margaret Thatcher’s statement that there is “no such thing as society,” which was swallowed wholesale by UK culture and has become accepted wisdom. It takes a long time to recover from that idea. I was very struck by how the notion of citizenship and of belonging to one another wasn’t considered a bad thing in Germany, but rather a strength. Of course, Germany has its problems. I think artists are also citizens. It’s like what Nina Simone said, “You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” In other words, artists naturally talk about the world that they’re living in, just as everybody else does. But in our case, we happen to do it via the medium of whatever creative language we are involved with. So, it’s natural for creative work to engage with societies and the world around us, which is part of being a citizen.

OBRIST Going back to Cage, in Halberstadt, Germany, there’s his great piece, As Slow as Possible, which was intended to be the slowest piece of music in history—it will be going for centuries. That is longue durée, à la Fernand Braudel, in music. A lot of artists are interested in that right now. For example, we invited Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg to do a project, which was a garden for pollinators, not for humans. I hear rumors that you are also a farmer, besides being a great composer.

RICHTER I wouldn’t say I'm a farmer, necessarily. Still, this studio was conceived to be as integrated a project as possible on many levels. We grow all the food. Last year, we fed everyone in the studio from the garden. It’s a small-scale farming operation, but actually, most of the landscape we have here is forest. And that’s deliberately left alone because we’re trying to encourage pollinators and bird life, which is very much under pressure in the UK. That’s something Yulia and I have been very focused on: trying to get all the feedback loops working in a positive way.

OBRIST The other day, I spoke to Holly Herndon and we discussed this notion of harmony. Holly answered that harmony is a sophisticated communication technology. So, what is harmony for you? We haven’t talked much about technology, but I’m curious how these advanced technologies of our moment, AI and blockchain, change music or notions of harmony.

RICHTER Technology in music is a fascinating historical story. Even early musical systems are technological, but they’re technological from a conceptual level. The harmonic language we use, which Bach more or less perfected, is a conceptual technology. It’s a conceptual framework, which is very sophisticated, but it exists essentially in our brains. There’s no physical manifestation of it. However, it’s a very complex technological system, a cultural expression of the harmonic series. And then, of course, there’s all the physical technology, the synthesizers, the computers, all of these things which have, in a way, extended the palette outwards from acoustic instruments to essentially anything you can imagine. Ultimately, it still comes back to what you would like to say as an artist. Mentioning Bach again, his music is extraordinarily durable. You can play Bach on any instrument, any synthesizer, any computer, any piano, or sing it, or whatever it might be, and it still has something about it. That has to do with its organization; it has to do with its relationship via the tonal system to the harmonic series. So, there’s a kind of a fundamentalness about it, which has to do with what he’s trying to say. I’m very interested in the why of writing a piece of music, and that has to do with what I want to say.

OBRIST It's a paradox to ask someone who makes music to talk about silence. But I am curious if you could talk a little bit about the role of silence in your practice.

RICHTER Silence is one of the fundamental colors in my paintbrush. You have objects, content, and material, but how the music is put together is intimately related to the absence of those things with silence. Silence is the background tool. And it’s something I work with very consciously. Most of my writing process is taking things away.

MAX RICHTER Hi, how are you?

OBRIST I'm good, and you?

RICHTER I'm good.

OBRIST Where are you?

RICHTER I am in my studio in Oxfordshire.

OBRIST I was talking with your friend Nico Muhly, and he mentioned Studio Richter Mahr as a great example of a residency for musicians. Can you describe how it works?

OBRIST You mentioned that the space is like your instrument. Can you talk about what that entails—from the technology to the acoustics?

OBRIST Complexity and simplicity—all great things in art are often oxymoronic.

OBRIST For Rothko, “Art is an adventure into unknown worlds which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.”

Dior Men Cotton and Silk Jacket, Cotton Shirt

OBRIST It's a paradox to ask someone who makes music to talk about silence. But I am curious if you could talk a little bit about the role of silence in your practice.

Dior Men Cotton and Silk Jacket, Denim Jeans, Lace-Up Boot

AUTO BODY UTOPIA

May 11, 2025

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to ask you how it all began. How did you come to art or how did art come to you? Was it an epiphany or a gradual process?

PIPPA GARNER: Well, I was a misfit to begin with. It seems like the growth process can be enhanced by the situation you're in. I was a war baby. I was born in ‘42, and I still have a few memories of what life was like during that time. Everybody knew somebody that was in the Army. Even a small child can get a sense of what it feels like to have the world be at war. I didn't pick the time I came to life on Earth. The war years were a time of deprivation. And this is a country of extravagance—it was based on independence and outlaw thinking. And all of a sudden, the whole thing was thrown away because of the war. But living was good for me then because I went through adolescence just as consumerism was really born. The assembly line technology that had preceded World War II was advanced by war needs, so there were all these companies suddenly producing the fastest, best things they possibly could, from airplanes to shoes. Advertising was born out of that because they had to convince people they needed things they didn't realize they needed. Suddenly all these stores were flooded with consumer goods. Things that nobody could imagine: chrome blenders, waffle irons, ovens, and lawnmowers. And I was fascinated with that, particularly automobiles, because the cars that I grew up with all had very distinct faces—the eyes, the mouth, the nose. You could recognize whether it was a Studebaker or a Ford. They had a certain character and I felt like there was life there. It goes back to another childhood thing of wanting to bring things to life. I think all children go through that with their stuffed animals. They get off of it pretty quickly, but I never quite overcame that. Clear into my puberty and beyond, I still felt that cars were living. If I’d see a bad crash where the face of the car was all smashed, I’d burst into tears. I found that it was a useful tool as an artist because a lot of the stuff that I was making was a kind of consumerism.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You were in the Vietnam War with the US Army as a combat artist. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience? It also brought you to photography because you got these state-of-the-art cameras from Japan and started to take personal photographs, which became important for your later magazine work.

PIPPA GARNER: I was drafted in college. I used up several student deferments. Finally, they sent me the notice. So, I was sent to train as an unassigned infantryman in Vietnam, having no idea what I was going to be doing. I went over on a big plane full of people who were going to be assigned to different units. Once I got there, I thought, gee, I wonder if there's something that might have to do with my art background. I did some research and sure enough, one of the divisions, the 25th Infantry, is the only division with a Combat Art Team (CAT). A group of people who had some art background were given an itinerary to go out with different units and document with drawings, pictures, and writing. The camera thing was interesting because the military store on the base had all this expensive Japanese camera equipment, very cheap. And I got a really nice Nikon camera for nothing and trained myself to use it. A lot of times things were going so fast that you couldn't really hold the image long enough to document it, so that's when photography became very much a part of my life.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Then you studied transportation design at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, an extremely well known institute. You had one of the first major epiphanies in 1969. You presented your student project, which was a half car, half human. Can you tell me and our readers about the epiphany that led to Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car). And also how people reacted to it?

PIPPA GARNER: There was a Volkswagen sports car in the '60s called the Karmann Ghia. It was considered a very sophisticated sports car during that time and that’s why I modified the spelling and called the sculpture Kar-Mann. I started going to art school fairly early. I went to the ArtCenter College of Design, which at that time was called Art Center School and it was in Hollywood. My father, who was in charge of things, saw that my interests were leaning toward art. To him, that was bohemian and something he didn't like. He was a businessman and wanted me to go into business. And so he tried to direct my art to car design because I was so interested in cars. He did a lot of research and found out that the school where all the car designers were trained was this Art Center School in Los Angeles. So I went out there in 1961 and found myself alienated because all the other students there wore suits and loved cars in a much different way than I did. I cherished [cars] in a way that was sort of comical. I thought some of them were really funny and stupid looking, so I felt pushed into a satirical corner. So, I quit that school and went to the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, which is a wonderful fine art school, and I started doing a lot of life drawings. I fell in love with life drawing. To study the form, you have to understand it from the inside out or else it doesn't look lifelike. But I got quite good at it. So, eventually I went back to the Art Center. I still had the design classes, but they had life drawing work. And so, I began doing tons of life drawing and sculpting the human form. It just fascinated me. But the idea of making this half car, half man, was something that I did as a sketch. There was a wonderful teacher that encouraged out-of-the-box thinking a bit more, and when I showed him the sketches he said, “Why don't you make that?” So, I figured out the proportions—I wanted the human part to be about the size of a small male figure, and then I found a toy car and was able to integrate that using styrofoam to make the basic sculpture. And then, I covered it with resin to make the surface hard and did all the detailing. I was making fun of cars.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I've just written the book Ever Gaia [Isolarii, 2023] with James Lovelock, who invented the Gaia Hypothesis with Lynn Margulis. He was a serial inventor. In a similar way, you are a serial inventor. You created all these objects between design and non-design, and then images of these objects were published in magazines, like Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. It's interesting that you then decided to go beyond the art world. I've always been very interested in that. Can you talk a little bit about how you bring these objects to a bigger audience, through magazines, but also appearances on talk shows?

PIPPA GARNER: When I was doing all that work in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there was a real barrier between fine art and commercial art. If your work occurred in magazines, it was low grade. No matter what it was. It was degraded by the fact that it was published. And I reversed that in my mind. I thought, well, gee, that's not right. Here's an opportunity to have things out there reaching thousands of thousands of people as opposed to an art gallery. I love the idea of having as much exposure as possible. Even though I've had close friends that were recognized fine artists, and in a bunch of the galleries—I never really cared much about it. I did have a couple of gallery shows here and there, but mainly the thing that fascinated me was the fact that I could reach people clear across the country, and sometimes beyond, with these images. I didn't have much money during those years, but I always got enough out of the magazines.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And of course, one of your key inventions, which is so famous today, is the backwards car from 1973. It's also interesting because it was a different time in magazines—when they paid for these extraordinary realities to happen. Can you talk a little bit about the epiphany of the backwards car and how it then drove on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco?

PIPPA GARNER: There was a period in all the major American car companies after World War II when they started having these really huge design departments. They used a lot of references to jet planes. The Cadillacs in the ’50s were huge, and they looked like they were moving even when they were standing still, which is called directional design. After my half car, half man, I started seeing cars in a context that had nothing to do with their purpose. The Cadillac particularly fascinated me because of the huge fins. And I had a good friend that was a designer who worked for Charles Eames in the early ’70s. He and I would go roaming around sometimes on our bicycles. One time, we went by this used car lot and there was a ‘59 Cadillac, and it just popped into my head, what if that thing was going backwards? It was just devastatingly funny and that convinced me that in some form it had to happen. So, I started sketching and figuring out how to do it, and I made a nice presentation. Esquire Magazine in New York responded and said, “Oh my God, we have to do this. How much do you want? How long will it take? We’re going to send a photographer to take pictures of the process.” But it couldn't be a Cadillac, because you couldn't see over the fins. So, I started looking in the papers until I found the car I wanted: a 1959 Chevy, two door sedan, six cylinder, no power steering or power brakes. I wanted a drive train as simple as possible so it would be easier to reconnect. It had fins, but the fins were flat, so they didn't obstruct your vision. And so I did the whole thing myself in a little garage space. Now, it was a matter of, how do I lift this thing up, turn it around, and set it back down on the frame? I didn't have access to any sophisticated technology to do it, so I got everybody I knew and we had a little party when I finally got everything cut away. Once everyone got a little bit high from the alcohol, I said, “Okay, folks, everybody around this car, shoulder to shoulder. When I give the command, I want you to lift the car up, and then walk it back, turn it around, bring it forward, and set it down again.” I thought it was going to be too heavy, but fortunately they didn't have any trouble. Once it was set back down, there was the backwards car. One day it was ready to try out and that was it, we went out and drove it around the San Francisco coast.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: The other day, I visited Judy Chicago, and of course she worked with car elements. There was also John Chamberlain. And during the same era, there was also Ant Farm, the architecture collective with whom you actually collaborated. And Nancy Reese was a big influence on you, because she made you realize that you can identify yourself as an artist. Can you talk a little bit about this?

PIPPA GARNER: Well, that was an interesting evolution, especially when you think back on it from the Information Age. Now, everything is shrunk down to nothing. There's no presence. Even cars look almost identical. You can't tell one from the other. The only way you can tell the difference between a Mercedes and a Kia is by getting close enough to look at the logo. Other than that, they're identical. They all get the same input. They use CAD design. So, that whole era really stands out. Everything was so unique. There was such an emphasis on trying to make things attract attention and to design things that make people say, gee, I gotta have that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: In 1995, you did this great project where you tried to get a custom license plate that said “sex change”—spelled SXCHNGE. But the authorities at the Department of Motor Vehicles turned it down, so you resubmitted with HE2SHE and it was accepted.

PIPPA GARNER: For me, the sex change thing was a material act. I never had a sense of being born in the wrong body as one of the expressions that they use goes, or had the trauma of being treated badly because of my sexual feelings. I never thought of any of this until I had already lived in my thirties as a male. And then suddenly, I ran out of interest in the assembly line products that I was so fascinated with. Even with cars, I felt like I had done as much as I could do. So I thought, there's gotta be something new, something else. And that was just about the time that changing your gender worked its way into the culture. The first example was, of course, Christine Jorgensen, way back in the ‘50s. But it wasn’t until the ‘80s when terms like transsexual started to be used. Leading up to that was the whole gay revolution. When I was growing up, you couldn't be gay. It was the most horrible, evil thing that could happen to a person. Gay culture was completely concealed. So coming out of these cultural biases became a real issue. And the human body—flesh and blood—fascinated me because I could still be using existing objects and juxtaposing them, but at the same time, making it fresh again. So, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, you know, I'm just at an appliance, like that radio over there, or the car sitting outside. The body that I was assigned to, I didn't pick it. I didn't say I want to be white, middle class, and heterosexual. So, if I am nothing more than another appliance, why not have some fun with it? Why not play with it and alter it in a comical way? Finally, that escalated into my deciding to go through with the surgery, which I went to Brussels for in 1993. I had what they call a vaginoplasty. Now, part of me is European [laughs]. I came back from that and thought, this is great, I’m in my forties, I've had a penis for all these years, and now I have a vagina. What an amazing thing—I live in an age when you can do that. You could go and pay somebody some money and say, “Here, I want to have my genitals turned the other way around.” And they said, “Fine, here's the bed.” (laughs) I was fascinated with the fact that I could do that with my body. It gave me a sense of control and a sense of a whole new area that I could explore. Meanwhile, the culture was changing and becoming more open. It's still not good, but it's much better than it was. I was kind of a pioneer with that perhaps.

Pippa Garner,Neopop Businesswear (Half-Suit), 1980–1981,Photograph by James Hamilton.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There's this amazing conversation, which you did with Hayden Dunham, about the struggle of being inside bodies. You say that because the advertisements and consumerism in the background in your life were always very gender oriented, you were forcing yourself to become more masculine. And at a certain moment, you decided not to conform anymore. It’s so pioneering. Can you talk a little bit about that?

PIPPA GARNER: Everything is structured in the culture to try and keep people in a comfort zone. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit everyone. But how do you deal with that? How do you let people be what they want to be and still have a sense of the culture being unified and functional? Again, all these things are just a point of evolution. Things keep changing and moving forward, and they always will. I think about my life being one frame of an endless film—just my little thing, and then it goes to the next frame. And that goes on into the distance forever. I think that my perceptions of gender were very materialistic. I’m a consumer and this is what I do with my body. It was no different than someone putting on makeup, or somebody going to a gym, taking steroids, and building this huge body that doesn't have any purpose at all except for looks. I didn’t have anyone that was going to suffer for it. If I had a family, it might've been different, but probably not. At this point, I was single. I had nobody to be responsible for, except to keep things moving forward. I don't want my life to ever get stagnant, to start losing its rhythm. And that's what I'm fighting now, because at this age, how do I maintain that? It's very hard for seniors to keep one of the things that I think is essential for life and that is sexuality. Everything for me represents the lifespan—from baby to aged person. Whether it's called puberty, adolescence, middle age, old age, I feel the need to incorporate that thinking in my work to keep that sense of life going, and the most obvious way is by maintaining sexuality. If I don't have any sex drives, all of it goes flat. I take estrogen and testosterone so that I can keep an endocrine system that's young and still is attractive and wants to be attracted, even at 81. That’s one of the real essential parts of my inspiration. If I lose that, I don't have any ideas. It's funny because hospitals are all divided into these clinics. Because I’m a veteran, I've got this ten-story VA hospital building at my disposal and there are clinics for everything but sensuality. So, they’re really missing the point of trying to make people want to stay alive.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: In this conversation with Dunham, you say that you see the body as a toy or a pet that you can play with. You can change the shape of it. You're an inside and an outside.

PIPPA GARNER: Well, that's it right there. That keeps things interesting and keeps a sort of question mark floating in the air over everything. So, you're not quite sure what will happen, you know, maybe it will be a drastic failure, or maybe a revelation.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: We know a great deal about architects' unrealized projects because they publish them. But we know very little about artists' unrealized projects. I wanted to ask you if you have any unrealized projects, dream projects, which are either censored or too big to be realized, or too expensive to be realized?

PIPPA GARNER: Well, it's funny, because I always do. The problem is—and this is fairly recent—I was diagnosed with leukemia that was ostensibly from my time in Vietnam. I was there for thirteen months in the mid-60s. They were spraying Agent Orange, a defoliant, which turned out to be extremely toxic. I actually went on several of the missions with one of the planes that was spraying it, and there were no masks or anything. It stayed dormant until only a couple years ago, when all of a sudden, it caused pneumonia, which put me on life support for over six days. I was unconscious and I was in the hospital for a month in intensive care. Life support is terrible because it causes you to melt basically, mentally and physically. I've never gone through anything like that. All of a sudden, I found myself like a baby. I was able to go back home, but I still haven't fully recovered from that. I don't think I have the will. So, that's one of the problems. Now, I have this obstacle in my thought process because I'm constantly thinking, am I going to have some more time or not? You can be very isolated in Long Beach. Most of my friends are in Hollywood. So, I spend a lot of time alone, and I'm not good at that. I need to have back and forth. But I'm on the rules of the hospital. They did a five-hour infusion, which was a good thing. I'm lucky to have somehow survived to this point. I did something today with this young woman from the gallery who helped me take some pictures. It was a little thing I do for every April Fool's Day, which is my holy day. And so that was something that represents my thought process. I didn't have that two weeks ago. Then, all of a sudden, there it was. The same little mechanism back there was working. One thing that will be interesting is when we get autonomous cars. I want to live long enough to see that—something tangible. Something that affects my life that I feel stimulation from. Maybe I’ll just have one final burst left and then I drop dead. Or maybe not. I might be able to spread it out.

ANGELIC BODIES: AN INTERVIEW OF GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE

May 11, 2025

Artwork courtesy of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

According to Neitzche, everything returns to the wheel of the cosmic process. At the beginning again, and again, you will find “every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more.” In this eternal cycle, great subversive seers and mystics, like Genesis Breyer P’Orridge, come around rarely. Her pain and her pleasure is a shared agony and ecstasy, which P-Orridge has ameliorated with her epiphany of the pandrogyne, from which the artist has escaped the bounds of either/or binaries into a more angelic, divine gender. Part shaman punk and part hermaphroditic angel, P-Orridge has been led by a series of these outer body visions. From the founding of COUM Transmissions, which challenged British society with blood-soaked performances and general anarchic disruption, to Throbbing Gristle, which brought industrial music into the modern lexicon, to the acid house of Psychic TV, to finally finding love in a dominatrix named Lady Jaye. On the occasion of her first solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist visits Genesis at home in New York, where she is fighting stage IV leukemia, to discuss her many life-altering epiphanies.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST How is your archive organized?

P-ORRIDGE Just over two years ago, I had complete kidney failure. My fiancé [Susana Atkins] is Spanish. She came here with a multiple-visit visa and I got sick just after we met. She looked after me because I had to have somebody with me all the time. The last time she came to New York, she organized all the photographs and put several thousands into sections, subjects, and separate little boxes and drawers. Now I can ring her up in Spain and say, “Where are the pics of Lady Jaye peeing in the street,” and she’s like, “Box #6 in the drawer on the left.” She knows where everything is, she has a totally photographic memory.

OBRIST Is your archive digitized?

P-ORRIDGE No, I don’t have any money to digitize. I don’t take grants; I have no income because I can’t do concerts.

OBRIST Can you tell me about some of your recent gallery shows?

P-ORRIDGE I had a show open last recently in Miami at the Nina Johnson Gallery that’s called Closer As Love. I don’t really take any notice to be honest, I’m more concerned with staying alive. I mean, it’s great that there’s interest. It reminds me of Derek Jarman when he was diagnosed with HIV. He said to me one day when we were sitting in his flat, “You know Gen, once they know you’ve got some kind of terminal illness, they’ll suddenly say they appreciate what you do.” And he said, “I’ve never had offers of money to make films like I’ve had since they knew I was dying.”

And then of course, as soon as everybody heard that I was potentially terminally ill, I get exhibitions and people suddenly say they appreciate my body of work, and I sort of think, “Well, thanks for telling me that forty years too late.”

OBRIST Well, I sort of think there’s some other reason. It has something to do with you anticipating what’s happening now in the world?

P-ORRIDGE [laughs] Yeah, of course. I’m being deliberately cynical. I just thought what Derek said was interesting. When I came back from the hospital last time, my editor—because I’m writing my autobiography, he said, “You’ll never believe this. While you were in the hospital I got a phone call from the New York Times wanting a quote for their obituary.” And I went, “Really?” He said, “Yeah it’s a bit weird, isn’t it? It’s already written and they’re just updating it whenever you’re sick to make it seem current.” So, they’re all waiting. There’s all these vultures waiting to go, “Oh, what a shame Gen died.” [laughs] It’s strange isn’t it?

OBRIST When did you have the pandrogyny epiphany?

P-ORRIDGE Apparently, in the ‘70s. Jarret [Earnest], who curated the show in Miami, found an old interview where I was talking about panthropology in the ‘70s, so it’s always been there in my mind as an ultimate theme. It was more about logic, observation, and considering human behavior. There seems to be what has sometimes been called original sin. There seems to be a flaw in human behavior. For example, how could there ever be a Second World War? We’ve maimed each other, killed people we love, destroyed things we like. Why would we do that? We could never do it again. That was stupid! But we do it again and again.

OBRIST It’s like Nietzsche’s eternal return.

P-ORRIDGE And so, I wanted to think, how could we change that? If there’s no either/or, there can’t be the other, and that can’t become the enemy because there is no other anymore. So, if the two become one there’s this divine unity.

OBRIST So, then you will have peace?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah.

OBRIST So, it was actually a peace movement in a way?

P-ORRIDGE Sure, I’m a child of the ‘60s.

OBRIST And how did you begin? Because last time we spoke, you told me that it kind of all began when you were fifteen, discovering Max Ernst.

P-ORRIDGE [laughs] Oh that was just the collages, really. The idea that you could take images of so-called “reality,” and then create one that never existed. This was an incredibly powerful aspect of creativity that sometimes is buried in commerce now. In fact, to me, art has always been spiritual. Always. And ultimately the art that really matters has to lead us towards the salvation of the species, otherwise what’s it telling us?

OBRIST How to fight extinction?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, so I’m seeing these threads unfold more and more. I can remember when I was about eight or nine, watching my mother brush my sister’s long hair, and thinking, how come I can’t have long hair? And the answer was, because you’re a boy. So, at that point I saw that there was some misfiring in the logic. It was just an inherited, conditioned concept that didn’t make sense. And of course, as the ‘60s unfolded more and more, things that didn’t make sense, that were negative, were revealed and exposed for the insanity that they are. I’ve never changed my utopian view—that we have to work towards the species becoming one organism. No nations. No countries. No tribes. No either/or. No binary. We’re all human beings.

OBRIST So, it’s a very holistic idea?

P-ORRIDGE Absolutely. We truly are an artist who doesn’t just say that life and art are the same. From the very beginning, there has been no separation. That’s why I kept everything. That’s why I have an archive.

OBRIST Besides your autobiography, what books are you doing?

P-ORRIDGE We did a book on Brion Gysin that just came out.

OBRIST Brion Gysin brings things to your beginnings as well, because the other thing that seems so relevant in terms of your practice is this fluidity—painting, poetry, drawing, art, performance, music—you have so many dimensions. Poetry, as you told me last time we spoke, is quite at the beginning. And there are, of course, these two key influences, [William] Burroughs and Brion Gysin in validation of your entire creative and cultural engineering practice. How did you come to poetry, and why Burroughs and Gysin?

P-ORRIDGE I was at one of those horrible English private schools, I had a scholarship. It was called Solihull School. One day in English class, my English teacher said, “Stay behind after class.” And I thought, oh no. What have I done wrong? I must’ve got a bad mark on my essay. Then, he had this piece of paper, and he scribbled on it, “On The Road, Jack Kerouac,” and he said, “I really think you’ll appreciate this book. Try to find it.” My father used to travel a lot with his job, so I said to him, “Could you try and find this book when you’re driving around?” And one day he came home and he had a copy. He found it in a bargain bin on the motorway. And that changed everything again.

OBRIST On The Road was a bestseller then.

P-ORRIDGE It changed a lot of people I know from that era. But when I was reading it, what fascinated me about it was that it’s about real people. Although it’s written almost like a fiction, it’s real people. Who is Dean Moriarty? Who is Old Bull Lee? Who are they? I found out that one of them was William Burroughs. So then, I hitchhiked to London and went around all the old shops. I couldn’t find anything by William Burroughs back in ’65, ‘66. And then, I went to Soho, to the porno shops, and I remember I got Jean Genet and Henry Miller, because they were considered dirty books. And lo and behold they had Naked Lunch, since it had been prosecuted for being obscene. So, I bought the only copy, well actually I stole the only copy that they had. I read that and thought, wow, it’s a bit like Max Ernst. This is someone changing reality again. Reality isn’t linear. Time isn’t linear. It’s in a state of flux and chaos and again, the creative being has the ability, the right, and the opportunity to change reality. And that’s what I want to do because the reality I’m in isn’t one I enjoy. So, it’s a second liberation. For me, art is always about the big questions.

OBRIST Gerhard Richter says, “Art is the highest form of hope.” What would be your definition?

OBRIST Gerhard Richter says, “Art is the highest form of hope.” What would be your definition?

P-ORRIDGE Did he? Wow. I don’t have one because it’s always changing. I don’t think I’m on record as calling myself an artist or a musician. I have said I’m a writer, and I love to write, but it’s shamanic to me. I always say this to people at lectures, “What’s the first book of the Bible? Genesis. But what’s the other title of that book? The Book of Creation. What does that mean?” The first thing god does is create. That means creation is holy work. So, to be an artist or creator is to be using divine systems to get closer to a purer reality, and a divine perception of existence to go as deep as you can.

OBRIST It’s interesting, your first mentioned public appearance starts with Throbbing Gristle, but you did things long before.

P-ORRIDGE Oh, fuck yeah.

OBRIST So, when was the first public appearance of your work?

P-ORRIGE 1965. It was a street performance. I’m a great believer in not just sitting and complaining, but taking action. So, at this private school, we came up with this idea—I’d discovered Japanese haiku. We wrote lots of different words on cards by hand, and then on a Saturday, with two or three friends, we went around the town, which was a really horrible, sterile, suburban place, and we left them in the gutters, ashtrays, waste bins, just on the floor. We made this beautiful litter, and the idea was that people picked it up thinking, what’s this? They were accidentally writing a poem. It was written about in the local paper, then it got mentioned on BBC radio, and then I was asked to give talks at the local church.

OBRIST It’s interesting that you then became part of collectives of groups. How did COUM begin?

P-ORRIDGE We’d left the Exploding Galaxy, David Medalla’s project, and decided to hitchhike around London. So, I went and saw my parents. They moved to a town near Wales named Shrewsbury and they just started their own business. I said I’d help in the office typing invoices and stuff, and one day I went with them for a drive through Wales. I was in the back of the car and it was a sunny day. I had my head on the window of the car, I closed my eyes, and then all of a sudden, I was next to the car. My consciousness was flying along next to the car. But, it was passing through the hedges, nothing actually blocked me, I could penetrate the physical world. That happened for about twenty minutes, or so. All the while, I was hearing voices, seeing images and symbols, and one of them was ‘Cosmic Organicism of the Universal Molecular,’ and ‘transmission.’ COUM Transmissions. When I got home, I wrote everything I could remember down.

OBRIST These were all written as text?

P-ORRIDGE Scribbled in notebooks. Some of them still exist. One of the words we received was cosmosis.

OBRIST Like cosmos and osmosis.

P-ORRIDGE Exactly, and it was the positive transfer of energy from one being into another, like in a plant, but between beings. That the whole universe was smaller, and smaller, and smaller particles until there were no particles. In a way, it was a precursor to quantum physics, though I didn’t know anything about quantum physics. And so, I felt that not only was it this true epiphany, but that it was my lifelong task, my mission, to proselytize the core ideas of that for the rest of my life.

OBRIST It was like a manifesto?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah.

OBRIST What was the epiphany of Throbbing Gristle?

P-ORRIDGE Oh, there wasn’t one. That was just logic, and observation, and deduction. I was looking at music and thinking, god I haven’t bought any records for two or three years, and why haven’t I? Because it’s not satisfying. It’s not teaching me something I didn’t know. So what am I gonna do? I guess I have to make music that does satisfy me. Because that’s the COUM approach: if it’s not there, then make it.

With music it was: What is music? Music is sounds. There’s no good or bad sounds, there’s just sounds. What is a rhythm? Something that happens at least twice. That’s it, that’s all it is. What do we got that we can make sounds with? We looked around our basement and we had a broken bass guitar, an old violin, and an old drum kit. We bought a guitar from Woolworth’s for 15 pounds, and Cosey said, “It’s too heavy.” So, we sawed off the extra wood and asked, “How’s that?” and she said, “Much better.” Chris Carter built his own synthesizers, Sleazy was totally into tape recorder experiments à la Burroughs, and I was really into writing lyrics that were based on love stories and rhythm and blues, American rock, and so on. Something that was English and about my experience in post-war Manchester. By process of reduction, you end up with what’s left and go, that’s what we have.

OBRIST The best producer is a reducer.

P-ORRIDGE Yes, of course. When I was once asked to remix “Test Dept,” because they were having real problems, I went and erased all but three tracks and it was fine. Throbbing Gristle was very much conceived in the same structural way. Then, I thought it has to have a name that has nothing to do with the history of rock music. I thought factory because of Andy Warhol, but that’s too obvious. I was talking to my friend Monty and he goes, “Gen you keep saying the word industrial. You keep saying industrial this, and industrial that.”

OBRIST It’s a very Manchester word.

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, of course. I was talking about the factories in Manchester and all the steam trains being cut up when they were obsolete. So, I went, oh yeah, it’s industrial music. That was September 3, 1975. Then, it was a matter of convincing the rest of the world that what we were doing was a really good idea. [laughs]

LOSING MY RELIGION - MICHAEL STIPE

May 11, 2025

Michael Stipe, the soulful vocalist, lyricist, poet, photographer, and visual artist from Athens, Georgia woefully echoes the dark and melancholic with his unique, once-in-a-generation voice and a stage presence that recalls a Southern preacher summoning distant ghosts. He has said that generations of men in his family were Methodist ministers and that he comes from a place of faith. REM, the band he founded with fellow students at the University Of Georgia, which released its debut album in 1981, inspired a generation of bands after them: The Smiths, Nirvana, Pixies, The Cranberries, and countless others. For three decades, the band cemented itself as one of the most important and foundational fulcrums of alternative music. Their song “Losing My Religion,” an unlikely smash hit from the band’s 1991 album Out Of Time, is a haunting, prophetic, and abstract ballad of fractured spirituality, existential questioning, and yearning that could very well be a soundtrack to our present reality. In September 2022, the music video for “Losing My Religion,” which was directed by Tarsem Singh, reached the rare milestone of one billion views on YouTube. In the following interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stipe discusses his disparate art-making practices, alternative truths, and art as the highest form of hope.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I have some questions about the past, but I think we should start with the extreme present. You're working a lot, as always, and you're editing images. The last time we spoke you were involved with the curation of some shows and also with your own visual art practice. So, I'd love to hear more about what you're working on now.

MICHAEL STIPE Right now, it feels like there's this upsurge in interest in magazines. I'm doing all this work for different magazines, like this conversation. And it's exciting to me. I was editing images for a collection of nudes—photos that I took some years back, but have never been seen before. Some were in the books that I've done with Damiani. I've done three books now with Damiani out of Bologna, and I'm working on a fourth book. I'm also working on another book with a different publisher, which is a collection of lyrics. And I'm doing that with Patti Smith. Then I'm working on my first solo album, which hopefully will be out by September of 2023, and a solo show at ICA Milan—also in fall of 2023. And that will be a lot of photographic works, some sculpture pieces, and some audio/visual stuff, not unlike what you saw at the Serpentine so long ago.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Can you tell me about these books? Helen Levitt once told me that when a photographer makes a book, it's often as important as an exhibition. And that's not only true for photographers, it's also true for visual artists. The artist book is such an important medium. We just lost Lawrence Weiner, one of the great masters of artist books, who had done hundreds of them. And you've given a lot of time to these artists' books with Damiani. Can you tell me about these three different volumes?

MICHAEL STIPE Sure. I'd love to. But first I have to ask, you spoke with Helen Levitt?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I had a conversation with Helen Levitt when she was in her late eighties. In her house, in New York, the heating wasn't so great, it was a bit chilly. And she had layouts of books around. And then there was a lamp in the middle of the table—quite a big lamp. And that was the warmest place, because the lamp emanated some warmth. And her cat sat underneath the lamp because the cat was also freezing. And so, it was actually a trialogue between her, myself and the cat.

MICHAEL STIPE Incredible. I tried with two friends in 1989 to make a documentary film on the life of Helen Levitt and the work that she produced as an artist. I think she's extraordinary. But we never succeeded in making the documentary. We had to go through a woman who was acting as her agent, but this woman had severe allergies to everything. So, we were not allowed to wash our bodies with soap, or wear deodorant, or use shampoo, or smoke within three days of seeing this woman. And we never got past her to Helen. So, I'm thrilled that you did. As a fan of her work, I purchased several of her images in the 1980s and I still have them. I still have the box that she wrote in her beautiful script: fragile, please do not bend. I have to say, I agree with Helen Levitt in terms of images done for books. At this point in my early sixties, I'm realizing that books are quite permanent, and they'll get lost or forgotten, and then they'll get found again many generations, or decades later. I love the photo books that I've worked on for that reason, because I think they can be either seen or not seen right now. One of my most recent purchases that I've been reading is this hysterically funny memoir, a biography of John Hurt, the actor. I bought it on eBay. It's signed to Michael, with my very best wishes, John Hurt. Well, I bought it on eBay and it was some other Michael that he signed this book to, but it's quite interesting. And then I have this book by the photographer Dino Pedriali—images of [Pier Paolo] Pasolini.

“We're at battle with ourselves to try and establish what is truth and what is alternative versions of truth…” - Michael Stipe

HANS ULRICH OBRIST So, you also collect books?

MICHAEL STIPE I love books. But my point is that these books were put out sometime in the 1970s, and they'd been forgotten on a shelf somewhere for all that time. And as I developed an interest in Pasolini, my boyfriend Thomas [Dozol] is reading a book of Pasolini’s as he travels from Berlin to New York, completely separate from my having collected these books by Dino Pedriali. As an artist, I feel like my job really is to address the present moment and try to be as instinctual and true to myself in that moment, because I feel like that always resonates. Even if it's not completely obvious, there's always an audience for work that is instinctual and is done about the present moment. It's our job to push ideas forward and to push towards a more expansive, progressive future. To answer your question about the three books with Damiani—Volume One was the first one that I did, with Jonathan Berger, the artist and curator. And the second one that I did with Douglas Coupland, [Our Interference Times: A Visual Record], is about the strange moment that we are in now between analog and digital, and how generationally you can sit down with a 15-year-old or a 25-year-old and have a completely different perspective on what imagery is and what it means, and the power of imagery based on how they've received their information digitally versus how we received our information. Our generation received it first in analog. Now, there’s a renewed interest in younger generations working with analog methods like cameras with film, which I've gone back to. Having been almost exclusively digital for a while, I've now gone back to [Kodak] Tri-X, which I just love shooting with.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST It's interesting about the analog—the fact that our generation kind of lived in this inbetween space because we had an analog childhood and then at a certain point in the ‘90s, the digital arrived. I remember when I visited you in your apartment in New York, maybe ten years ago, when we started to work on a Serpentine performance, you showed me some sculptures of analog media, like audio cassettes. It would be great to hear a little more about your sculpture.

MICHAEL STIPE I mean, those felt necessary at the time. But now, it's interesting that there's a renewed interest in vinyl for listening to records. There's a renewed interest in cassettes for listening to music. There's a renewed interest in all these cameras that I thought were just moving into the past. They became relics, which is what I called those bronze pieces. I love picking up a camera that looks like it's made of plastic, and it's bronze, and it weighs five pounds, and it's quite fun to watch people's reaction when they pick up one of those pieces. I've certainly moved on from there, though. That was a great long time ago. I think I did those pieces in 2008. But the book does address the cultural and generational shift that's occurred with the advent of digital technology and how impactful that's been on our lives. We now see the pathetic or rather sad impact of social media on politics and on political movements. And now, we're at battle with ourselves to try and establish what is truth and what is alternative versions of truth, and what is an alternative version of an alternative version of truth, and this is leading into territory that you and Doug [Coupland] certainly cover a lot in your work, which is more looking into the future to wonder where we're going to be. With the advent of Deepfake and AI, we have to be quite careful about where it's all headed and establish grounded attitudes towards what is real and what is not real, but also obviously grounded attitudes about what is the importance of privacy and how that impacts our daily lives.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST The book addresses that big theme?

MICHAEL STIPE Mostly it's visual. It's about how if you move into a digital image, it eventually looks like a molecular photograph of nature, and how as we get further away from analog through digital technology we become perhaps a little more understanding of the magnificence of nature, and we maybe have a greater calling towards preserving our place here on this beautiful planet, and acknowledging the impact that we've had through all these advancements that we've made. Some of which are absolutely brilliant. But moving forward with true stewardship, not only towards ourselves, but towards other species and the concerns that have arisen with our dominance over the past couple hundred years.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST It’s interesting because I remember about fifteen years ago, when we saw these sculptures of yours and there were the first exhibitions, and then you started working on the books—you didn’t stop making performances. People thought that you transitioned from music into arts, but looking at your trajectory, that's far from the truth. The truth is that you've always had these parallel realities. There is music, but there is also poetry to the lyrics. There is visual arts. There is photography, and of course performance.

MICHAEL STIPE Performance is profoundly important, because it’s always what I did.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Your practice is very fluid. It incorporates poetry, music, performance, architecture. They are parallel realities.

MICHAEL STIPE Yes. I agree entirely. I'm happy that this century has provided us with a language and an understanding of stepping away from that sandboxing, where you do one thing and that's all that you should do. And rather, acknowledging that there's a Venn diagram. There are areas that overlap, particularly within the creative community now. People are able to establish their work in more than one medium. Patti Smith is an excellent example of that as well. The work that she's done as a writer in the past decade has added to the understanding of her as a polyglot—and added to the work that she did as a singer, songwriter, musician, and performer. And there's a younger generation of people that don't feel constrained by these same ideas; that if you're an actor, that's all that you can be. If you're a musician, that's all that you can be. If you're a painter, you should absolutely not try sculpture or poetry. Well, I think that's hooey.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And of course, Patti Smith has to do with an early epiphany of yours because there’s a rumor that you were fourteen when you saw an article in Cream magazine by Lisa Robinson on the CBGB scene. There was a photo of Patti Smith and that somehow was a trigger. It’s interesting because I spoke to Kazuyo Sejima and I asked, “Why did you become an architect?” And she said, “You know, when I was a teenager, I opened a magazine in my parents' house and there was a photo of Sky House by Kiyonori Kikutake and this little black/white photo opened everything.” It seems like that photo of Patti Smith, who later became a friend and colleague, has been really liberating for you. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MICHAEL STIPE It's really wild to count her among my closest friends and to be able to observe the work that she does as an artist from a distance as a fan, but also from really up close and to see how dedicated she is to her work. As a friend, she'll ghost me for two weeks at a time and I'll finally reach out to her, like, are you okay? Is everything right? It turns out she's just been off writing and working. Phone calls and texts and communication with friends and family fall to the wayside. She has this sense of priority to her work that I find extremely invigorating and thrilling—it pushes me to embrace the moment when I am working, to step away from the phone to step away from this feeling that I have to be in constant contact with people all the time. I mean, I'm doing this conversation with you partly because I just haven't seen you in so long and I wanted to say hi, but I'm in the middle of writing a series of songs—I've got eight finished, I'm working on another ten of those, and about six are in very good shape. And so, I've been in the studio all week, working predominantly with synthesizers, and working with a live drummer, which is brand new for me since my former band disbanded. It's my first solo record, and I just had to step away from what turned into about five years because it was so all-encompassing. In the most beautiful way, it steals every breath that I had for the better part of my adult life. I needed to take a really long break away from music in order to either approach it again or to find other mediums that I wanted to explore. As it turns out, because of the 21st century, with the understanding that a lyricist can do all these other things, I feel free and open to exploring this publicly. It's stuff that I would've been doing privately anyway, but now there's this interest in books and how permanent books are compared to performance, compared to other ways that I've expressed myself in the past. I'm really excited about my books being stuck on a shelf somewhere and discovered fifteen years from now by someone who doesn't even know that I once sang with a band, or that I have a voice outside of photography, or portraiture.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And there is one book that’s missing—a book of earlier poems and lyrics, that doesn't exist yet. No?

MICHAEL STIPE That's the book that I'm working on with Patti. It was her idea and she really pushed me to put out a classic volume of poetry in the form of lyrics.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And what are the new lyrics about?

MICHAEL STIPE I'm right in the middle of it, so it's hard to talk about, but there's a very 21st-century duality. The themes that I'm addressing are extremely layered and nuanced. There seem to be threads running through the songs not only thematically, but there are these characters I’ve written that keep appearing at different times in their lives. There are a few examples of new work online, a song called "Your Capricious Soul" and there's a song called "Drive To The Ocean" that you can find on all the streaming platforms. I released them as they came out because I didn't want to feel like I was holding material for a big solo album splash. I just felt more comfortable putting it out into the world and letting it be what it is right now.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And the theme, of course, of the magazine is “Losing My Religion.” It will be an exploration of changing belief systems in the age of information and disinformation, secularization, conspiracy theory. You already talked about the information age in relation to your books, and I suppose those are themes that appear in the new lyrics.

MICHAEL STIPE I'm quite suspicious of social media. I was on it for a while and I was having fun with it. But then, I felt violated by it, truthfully. I felt like this was not the truest or best way for me to establish communication with, not only people that are in my life, but also with some spoken or unspoken audience that's out there watching or listening. This is something that we really do have to address in a big way: the impact that this has on how we are able to, or not able to, communicate with each other as individuals, as people, and to question these very important issues of privacy and truth. What is truth? You know, Wolfgang Tillmans did this book called What Is Different?, which addressed the idea of people that have believed something, and then when that thing is proven to be false, rather than acknowledging that they've been tricked, they double down. It’s called the Backfire Effect. So, what is truth, and what is alternative truth? Another one of my main sources is a podcast that I strongly recommend called Conspirituality. It's these guys that talk about exactly these topics in a way that I find very interesting. I follow them quite routinely. One of the last books that I thoroughly enjoyed was a recommendation from that podcast by an author named Benjamin Teitelbaum called War For Eternity. It's quite prescient to the moment that we're in, because one of the main characters in the book is Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher whose daughter was just murdered in a car bomb in Moscow.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Who is a nationalist philosopher.

MICHAEL STIPE Yes, but he's also a follower of a spiritual belief called Traditionalism, and he shares that belief system with other people, such as Steve Bannon and Olavo de Carvalho, who died this past February in Virginia, but was an advisor to Bolsonaro in Brazil. So, it's all these places where these somewhat despotic or protofascist leaders are espousing these ideas and putting them into policy, and behind them are these people that have this shared spiritual belief system.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST This issue is connected to these current discussions. You already addressed information, and disinformation, but it's also an homage to the extraordinary hit single of yours and REM, “Losing My Religion.” And it connects to what we just said about your lyrics being great poetry, which are about very existential torment. As far as I understood from what I read is that the title comes from a Southern expression that refers to being so desperate and at the end of your rope that you lose faith. Can you talk about the moment, or the epiphany for this song?

MICHAEL STIPE I don't remember the moment of titling the song, “Losing My Religion.” The lyrics came out of automatic writing. The actual Southern phrase that I drew from is not losing, it's lost. I lost my religion. I almost lost my religion. You would say, “The rain was so intense I almost lost my religion.” Or, “We were late to the party and she kept yelling in the car—I almost lost my religion.” You would say it in this very casual way. But in the song, it becomes much more than that. It turned out to be the biggest hit that my band had at the time—other songs eclipsed it later, but that was and remains one of our best known songs. The book I was just talking about with these followers of Traditionalism is, in a way, a 21st-century version of a kind of made up religion that is inspired by Hinduism, but has been pieced together. And these quite significant characters in our history as we are living it in the present moment, they each have their own version of it, and they don't even necessarily agree. In one case, you know, Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon are working against each other in terms of China and what China means to the Soviet Union or what China means to the Western world. And so, it reminds me of another song I wrote called “Oh My Heart.” And the opening line is the kids have a new take on faith. Pick up the pieces and get carried away. It addresses this idea that in our generation, Hans Ulrich, people in the 1960s and ‘70s started to question organized religion and the importance it had in our lives. Not just politically, but spiritually and emotionally how manipulated we were by our belief systems. In questioning these organized religions, we all started piecing together from different belief systems. So it was like, here's this new thing called transcendental meditation, or here's an understanding of Hinduism that we didn't have before through the advent of yoga, and the Beatles going to hang out with the Maharishi, or the concert for Bangladesh. All these different understandings coming at us and people pulling from Judaism, from Buddhism, from Islam, from Christianity, from Catholicism, from Atheism, pulling together and creating each of us, a church of ourselves, a belief that what's right for Michael is the church of Michael. And I'm gonna alter and shift these beliefs and these ideas as they fit what I need them to be. And you could say the same for the church of Hans Ulrich. There may be a lot of overlap in your belief system with my belief system, the things that we agree or disagree about, but there might be places where mine just goes flying off into outer space with let's say an interest in Vedic astrology. And yours might go flying off in a different direction with an interest in a messenger RNA technology brought about by fever dreams, let's say. So that’s something that the 21st century has afforded us. And it's interesting to me—this phrase “Losing My Religion” is something that can be taken in many, many different ways. And it's a nice song—it's a song about kind of an obsessive, yearning love—but as a phrase it moves into culture in a way that it has a much broader and more nuanced meaning.

“I'm the glass half full guy, I always will be, even with my darkest writing, my darkest songs, I try to infuse a bit of hope and optimism into them.” - Michael Stipe

HANS ULRICH OBRIST It’s one of my favorite songs. Also, what happens when religion is gone and there are no gods to turn to? It brings me to the question of art being a new religion—maybe not a new religion, but art as the highest form of hope, as Gerhard Richter said.

MICHAEL STIPE Oh, I would not be in disagreement with that. You know, it's a little bit of church of Michael for me to say this, but I do believe that artists at their best are providing new ways to look at who we are in the moment in order to present a more hopeful, more progressive or optimistic future, to move forward as humans with a greater understanding of the complexity of our emotional and our spiritual lives, and allowing ourselves as artists to be vulnerable, to fall on our face publicly, to put together an entire body of work that may be actual shit. And then to say, “Well, what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.” I think with live performance, certainly, and I know this firsthand, every night wasn't brilliant, and there were nights when people recognized that. But there was an understanding that these are humans trying to do their very best work, and we have to acknowledge and understand the positive things that they've done and say, “Well, they had an off night, maybe it wasn't as great as it could have been.”

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Another thing, which has to do with this idea of collapse is the extinction crisis. MIT published a report in the ‘70s saying that by the mid-21st century, with the extraction of resources, mining, and environmental disasters, that we are on track for this collapse of civilization. And now predictions are that this could even be even earlier than 2040 as predicted, but as soon as 2030. There are more wars and famines. So, that of course also raises the question, not only of art being hope, but also of the agency we have in finding solutions. Can you talk a little bit about this?

MICHAEL STIPE For me, it started at a very young age. I bought my first toys as a seven-year-old by collecting bottles and newspapers, and recycling them. But I had a very early class at the age of thirteen or fourteen in environmental science. It was a year-long class and I believed quite naively from that class that my generation would be the one that would bring about alternative energy. That we would cure the problems of air pollution, of industrial pollution, of landfills. Climate change was not something that was spoken about in 1973 or ‘74, but everything that was written then was leading towards this ultimate collapse of our relationship with our planet, with the world. The idea that our grandparents’ generation had, about the world’s resources being endless, and not finite, we now understand to be inaccurate. Something that art can provide, hopefully, is optimism. I'm the glass half full guy, I always will be, even with my darkest writing, my darkest songs, I try to infuse a bit of hope and optimism into them, or a bit of an epiphany into the character so that even if they are in this very dark place, they're coming through it into something else. We didn’t recognize growing up, the idea that by the mid-21st century, and now possibly sooner with this ecological disaster upon us, this would have such an impact on young people. They’re bombarded with this message from social media, television, their parents, school teachers, policymakers that it's hopeless. And this hopelessness is emotionally and spiritually infused into these younger generations. Again, I’m quite hopeful, but I see the exact opposite of that. I feel like culturally, there is this immense problem of hopelessness. But I also see—and I'm speaking of my goddaughters here, so this is anecdotal—people that are teenagers now, or in their early twenties, and are turning this on its head and saying, “This is our time to make vast change, to implement the knowledge that we have available to us, and push it towards something that is hopeful, and not just a collapsing dystopian universe.”

HANS ULRICH OBRIST In terms of positive contributions that actually can be done, you did the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief fund, covering Joseph Arthur's “In The Sun.” Can you talk a little bit about this?

MICHAEL STIPE My response to Katrina was visceral because I had worked in New Orleans and I felt obligated to that city. The song that I quoted earlier about the kids having a new take on faith is a song written about Katrina. It's a character that has survived the storm, and is now being bussed off to some other place, and he has no idea where he's going. There's two songs—one called “Houston,” and that was immediately after Katrina. And then, there's another song called, “Oh, My Heart.” Each of these are the same character, in the first song, leaving New Orleans as a destroyed flooded city. And in the second song, returning to New Orleans to help bring it back to the majesty of a city, we raised over a million dollars for Katrina hurricane relief. Justin Timberlake helped with the record. All these people stepped forward and donated their time and energy towards providing something that would allow for a little bit of relief for the people that lived there and the people that were displaced. And displacement is another part of what we're looking at—we're going to have environmental refugees and political refugees for the remainder of our lives. This is something that we need to address immediately because of these larger ideas of what is a nation, what is a border? What is our obligation? Where is nationalism after the perversion of that, that we found in the 20th century during World War II? What is nationalism and what is the importance of nation states and borders? And a greater understanding, that might be extremely church of Michael, but a greater understanding of humanity and the idea of Gaia, the idea of Earth as its own entity, and our relationship to it.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I met James Lovelock and did long interviews with him about his ideas on Gaia. One of the things we can concretely do about climate change is eat less meat. So, you've also opened a vegetarian restaurant in Athens, Georgia—is that still open?

MICHAEL STIPE It is ongoing, but I didn't open it. I'm the landlord of the building that the restaurant is in. I was never involved beyond that. So, that's been a misunderstanding or rumor for decades. I decided very early on as a young man that I didn't want to eat meat and I stopped for twenty years. And then, I started again, and stopped again. But it’s a very minor example of something that we can do individually. There are greater understandings to address and questions to be thrown into the conversation in terms of where we are with climate refugees and with climate change, and all the other problems we are facing now. Brian Eno also started the organization Earth Percent which is basically a tithing for people who work in the music industry, to offer a percentage of the money that they are able to bring in towards addressing climate change.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Somebody who is in the younger generation of music and has been very active in environmentalism is the amazing Mykki Blanco. And you worked on a new track with Mykki for his album. Can you tell me about that?

MICHAEL STIPE We've known each other for a while and he just sent me a text and said, “I'm doing a new record. I've got a song, I hear your voice on it. What do you say?” And I said, “send me the song. Let me see what I think about it.” And I loved the song—it’s called “Family Ties.” I recorded my voice and did some footage for a music video and they mixed it in. It's a beautiful song and a beautiful record. And Mykki is a beautiful, beautiful performer. The album and song is available online.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I forgot to ask you before, do you remember the day when you decided that REM would be called REM and what prompted that name?

MICHAEL STIPE Yes, it’s funny. We needed to have a name. So, we opened a dictionary, stayed up all night and wrote names with chalk on the wall of the apartment we were renting at the time. There were a lot of joke names that were silly and stupid, but the name REM I found in the dictionary, which stands for ‘rapid eye movement.’ We decided to take the name and make it stand for nothing. And I hadn't really written a proper song at the age of twenty when we chose that name. But a year and a half later, I had started writing proper songs. I found my voice as a writer and as a lyricist. Looking back, it's interesting to me that a lot of the inspiration that I have comes from this quasi-somnambulant dream state. And that's where these lyrics and these ideas are coming from. So, REM was quite appropriate as a name.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST We know a lot about architects' unrealized projects because architects enter into competitions, and they publish them, which helps with later making them seem perfectly realizable. But we know almost nothing about visual artists, musicians, composers, poets, and filmmakers’ unrealized projects. It's interesting to talk about unrealized projects, not in order to keep them unrealized, but to actually create awareness and maybe find ways to get them realized. I was curious if you could tell me about one, or two, or three of your favorite unrealized projects.

MICHAEL STIPE Speaking as a 62-year-old, and realizing that my time on Earth is limited, and the ideas that I have just keep compounding, I have to really focus on what's significant enough for me with the time I've got remaining and focus on that. I want to be happy in the work that I'm doing. I want to feel satisfied and fulfilled on a personal level, but I also wanna feel like I'm leaving something behind. Not only am I addressing something in the moment, which is crucial to the artist, but I'm also leaving something behind that's significant and important. And that resonates past the moment of August of 2022. So unrealized projects—about ten or twelve years ago, I approached a couple of people with the idea of creating a marble bust. The three people that I will name are a friend of mine named John, who just has a very beautiful face, a very long nose, a very prominent brow, and large ears that stick out; Amanda Lepore; and the London-based chef, Margo Henderson—she and her husband have several restaurants. I just think she's one of the most extraordinarily beautiful women on Earth. Marc Quinn did some pretty significant busts, but I don't know of anyone who has really carried it into the 21st century. I felt someone needed to do that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Beautiful. And then, there are also some of your films. I remember you once told me that just after launching the debut album of REM, you worked on a low-budget, Super 8 film, and that's a realized, unrealized project. It was shot in Athens, Georgia but it's actually never been released. Is that true?

MICHAEL STIPE I’m in my studio right now in Athens, Georgia and there are several boxes of undeveloped Super 8 film that I shot in the 1980s that had thematic thread running through them. The project was called Self-Timer. And then, of course, there's the project that I mentioned at the very top of our conversation—the documentary film about the work and life of Helen Levitt.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And that’s an amazing coincidence that we started with that. There is also an unrealized album with Kurt Cobain. I couldn't find much information online, but I know that you wanted to lure him away from his home to help him. And there was no more time, because he passed away. You did a tribute to him on the album Monster, but before that, when he was still alive, you wanted to do an album together.

MICHAEL STIPE The word lure is exactly perfect. I created a project to try to get him out of the frame of mind that he was in. He was in a very dark place and ultimately, he didn't survive that dark place. The plan was to geographically take him out of that house and put him in a recording studio with a project in mind. And I was dangling myself and the idea of a collaboration as the carrot, but it didn't work. I sent plane tickets. I sent a driver to pick him up. The driver sat outside the house for hours. Kurt never came to the door. And after his death, the plane tickets were thumbtacked to the wall in the bedroom. I'd like to think that he considered the possibility. I had turned to Jem Cohen, the astonishing film director out of Brooklyn, and he wrote a letter to Kurt describing a film project and saying that his voice and his working with me would be the perfect collaboration. But it was really something that I just made up to try to lure him out of a dark place.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I just reread Kurt Cobain's diaries. They're beautiful. I was wondering if you have diaries?

MICHAEL STIPE I don't, no. My diaries are photographs. I never liked my handwriting, so I try not to write anything down. I find it very distracting and embarrassing, and it’s the same with my signature, but as a public figure I'm expected to sign things. I've never kept a diary. Do you keep a diary? I would think that your conversations really are a brilliant testament of what you do.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST My diary is thousands of hours of conversations with artists, musicians, poets, architects. It’s a daily practice.

MICHAEL STIPE I don't know that anyone has matched the number of insanely talented people who you've sat down and had brilliant conversations with. It is, in its own right, a lost art. And so, thank you for that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST No, thank you for an amazing interview. It would have never happened without our friend Jonas Mekas. When I was in my early twenties, I was at a cafe in Paris and I told him what I was doing, that I wanted to document the ideas and lives of artists and architects. He always had his Super 8 camera, and he told me, “You are going to regret it one day, if you don't record all these conversations.” So, Jonas really pushed me to do it.

MICHAEL STIPE Wow. Of course it would be Jonas who did that. And I found in the Do It book, his instruction is one of the simplest: Do it, move your finger up and down for one minute every morning. That's Jonas. God bless him.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And last, but not least. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this beautiful little book with advice to a young poet. Obviously a lot of young artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers will read our interview and want to listen to you. So I’m wondering, what would be your advice to them? What's your advice to a young artist, filmmaker, musician?

MICHAEL STIPE Trust your voice, trust your instinct, allow yourself the space to hear what your instinct is telling you and make sure to write it down. Get it down on video, put it down on your phone—however you have to get it down. And then trust that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I think that could not be a more beautiful conclusion. Thank you so much.

MICHAEL STIPE Thank you Hans Ulrich, have a wonderful sleep tonight.

AGGRO DR1FT: HARMONY KORINE

May 11, 2025

All images: ©Harmony Korine Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Julian Cousin

HARMONY KORINE Hey. What's up, bro?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Good morning. How are you? I'm glad we connected. Congratulations on the film. It's amazing. I was grateful to be able to see it yesterday in Vancouver. Thank you for arranging this.

KORINE Of course. My pleasure.

OBRIST We've known each other for nearly thirty years! This is almost like an anniversary. Agnès B. introduced us in 1997.

KORINE Oh my gosh. Unbelievable. Time really flies.

OBRIST But today we are going to talk about the future, not the past, because in many ways the future is in video games. Last year, for the first time, more than three billion people were playing video games. That's more than a third of the world's population. It’s bigger than the music and the film industry put together. When I visited your studio in Miami, you told me that your new film and paintings have a lot to do with video games. Also, I remember speaking to you about Spring Breakers (2012), which you told me was like a video game. Can you talk about when and where your interest in video games began?

KORINE I grew up playing video games, in the ’80s. After school, we'd spend all day in arcades. It was always an escape. It was fun for me, obviously, in a similar way to films and art. Thinking back to Spring Breakers, I was feeling like life was starting to meld with gaming. And gaming was starting to meld into real life. In Spring Breakers, [Ashley Benson’s character] repeats the phrase, over and over again like a chorus, “Just pretend it's a video game.” It was a way of desensitizing herself to commit crimes.

OBRIST The notion of violence is present in some of the games. There's a conversation you had about violence with Paul McCarthy where you discuss the different stages of violence. Can you talk about how you see violence?

KORINE Violence in games, or violence in live action, always plays a role. It’s a transgressive action—something that you can consistently go to because there are many different shades of violence. Sometimes, depending on how you do it, violence plays out like a dance. In first-person shooter games, it's exciting. It becomes a basic premise for the narrative. That's something you can see with Aggro Dr1ft. In a lot of ways, it’s like Assassin's Creed or Halo: violence is part of the language.

OBRIST My next question is about rituals and our relationship to ritual. I was thinking about Trash Humpers (2009), which has all of these strange rituals. But also, in the new film and the paintings, there are quite a lot of ritualistic moments. In the ’70s, Andrei Tarkovsky said we live in a time bereft of rituals. And more recently, the philosopher, Byun-Chul Han, wrote a book about the lack of importance in ritual in the digital age.

KORINE I guess there's a certain connection between rituals and belief and even some type of a religious element. At the end of the movie, one of the characters says, “There's nothing but love in God, even after all the destruction.” He still has a belief in ritual and transcendence.

OBRIST Aggro Dr1ft has this very immersive dimension, like in video games.

KORINE I've always been interested in and strived towards something that has a total effect. Something very immersive and all-encompassing. I've always wanted a physical component to what you're watching—something that was just beyond the explanation.

OBRIST There’s an almost liquid narrative in the new paintings and in the new film. Can you talk a little bit about this liquid narrative?

KORINE If you play first-person shooter games, like Deathloop, Apex Legends, or any of the Overwatch games, you have a sense of being inside them. And there's a world creation that's very exciting to me. With the new film and the paintings—when we talk about this kind of liquid narrative—it’s more about this idea of stepping into a world where the narrative is not so one-dimensional. It’s much more immersive.

OBRIST Can you talk about the genesis of Aggro Dr1ft?

KORINE The name came late. I went through several different names. I was listening to this aggressive drift phonk remix, which describes the BO character perfectly. And obviously, there's a correlation between cars and drift music, and drifting. I think Aggro Dr1ft will probably be the name of the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth.

OBRIST When did you first start writing the script?

KORINE I had a storyline and characters, but there was no actual script. Honestly, I started to lose interest in conventional movies. I haven't felt much attachment or excitement in a while. And then, I noticed a singularity happening—where films, live-action, artwork, and music were starting to merge. But the real unifier, for me, was gaming. Gaming is capturing the culture in a way that nothing else is. Because graphics have gotten so good, and storylines, and role-playing games have gotten so immersive, it almost started to feel limitless. And so, I started this company with a lot of gaming developers, VFX kids, and people in this world. The question became: what's beyond movies? While Aggro Dr1ft is not a game, there is something that bridges the two things. Can you use gaming aesthetics in a way to tell a live-action story? We spent close to a year trying to develop a language, a look, and a feel of something I hadn't seen before. It was a challenge—we involved a lot of different elements of tech and art. Then, we started to crack it with the infrared, VFX effects, AI, and using gaming engines. We started to merge all of that into basically what the film became. Honestly, I wasn't even trying to make a movie. I was trying to make something else; I didn't even have a name for it. I was just drawing pictures.

OBRIST Since Kids (1995), you have always worked with a script. Was this the first time you worked without one?

KORINE What’s funny is that I started as a writer and then as the decades progressed, I lost almost all interest in writing. And so, I wanted to be able to almost freestyle a film in the way you could freestyle rap. I wanted to freestyle the film based on characters and ideas. And that's kind of what Aggro Dr1ft is. It was freestyled around a certain structure and the tech dictated a lot of the storyline.

OBRIST When I was watching it, it made me think of this text by the cultural commentator, Venkatesh Rao, on the unnarratability of the world.

KORINE I just don't even think time exists anymore. Time has been obliterated. I don't feel like there is even a past or a present. I think it's just the endless now.

OBRIST Can you tell me a little bit about the casting process in this film? You have Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott.

KORINE Jordi Mollà was one of my neighbors in Miami. I was hanging out with him a bunch. And I thought he was great in the movie Blow (2001) and Bad Boys II (2003). I just love the way he speaks and moves. So, he felt like the perfect BO. And then, Travis Scott just felt perfect for the Zion character.

OBRIST Since we have known each other—since the ’90s—you have always had this very holistic practice. You draw, practice photography, write books, and then of course, make movies. But these have all been parallel realities. With the upcoming show at Hauser & Wirth, painting and cinema are becoming one. Can you talk a little bit about how this fusion happened, which has led to your first show in Los Angeles in nine years?

KORINE I always liked the idea of a unified aesthetic. Painting, in a lot of ways, has taken over my life. But, I think it's the first show that I've ever done where the paintings directly relate to any of the film work. The paintings are stills from the film—done with oil on canvas. They're very simple, versus the film, which is very technical. I wanted to make the paintings in a very traditional way, but we're using a thermal coat of paint so that they resemble the film.

OBRIST When I saw the film yesterday, I was thinking that one could almost stop and take a screenshot at any moment. The film is almost an infinity of paintings. How did you choose the moments in the film that you would then paint?

KORINE It was so hard. Like you said, almost every frame you could stop at could be a painting. A lot of it was just random. I tried to jump from character to character and experiment with different moods. It was a process of elimination. What tone or ambiance felt the strongest? And as far as the show, what story can I tell through sixteen paintings?

OBRIST In the early ’90s and 2000s, you made a lot of doodles and drawings. And now in this digital age, does drawing still play a key role?

KORINE I draw much more than I write now. With Aggro Dr1ft having no script, really everything came from my drawings. Then, we started to develop things in-house that looked more like what you see in the film.

OBRIST In all your previous exhibitions, I always thought that the drawings are the heart of the work. They're so important.

KORINE It's like Dieter Roth. At his shows, the drawings are always the most exciting part.

OBRIST Or Paul McCarthy.

KORINE Or Paul. Exactly.

OBRIST I read this interview you did with Rita Ackermann about a previous series of paintings with teddy bears inspired by the professional arm wrestler, Cleve Dean. How did the new paintings grow out of that series?

KORINE They kind of progressed from that series, but I feel like this new series of paintings is a whole other thing. I started this design collective called EdgeLord which has some of the most innovative game developers and VFX guys. Sometimes, we'll sit there working with gaming engines, and sometimes we go in there and just play video games—it’s all to see how far we can push the imagery. The look of Aggro Dr1ft, both the live action and the paintings, comes from that process, which is very similar to putzing around with drawing. It’s a similar instinct or creative inclination. I’m using tech in a way that I never have before.

OBRIST You also said that there is freedom in painting, which you don’t have in any other medium. Why does painting give you the greatest freedom?

KORINE The other stuff requires a lot of time spent with other people, which is fun, which I like, but it can also be exhausting. There's something nice about going to the studio—in a similar way that I used to enjoy writing—I could just lock the door and start throwing paint and messing around. And then, there's nobody to talk to, no one to tell you they don't like a specific color that you're using or a gesture. Painting is very direct and immediate in a way that everything else isn't.

OBRIST In the teddy bear paintings, you inserted a radiating quality, which is also present in the new paintings. There’s that great song by Blondie, “Fade Away And Radiate.” Can you talk about this radiating quality?

KORINE Yeah, radiation is good. I wanted the new paintings to feel like they could just melt the walls. (laughs)

OBRIST Do you have a favorite color? You told Rita that your favorite color is yellow, but the new paintings have a much different color palette.

KORINE There's not much yellow in the new paintings, because it's all infrared. I was almost trying to figure out how to go beyond normal color. So, the new paintings are very red. They're kind of on fire. They're a bit dystopian.

OBRIST Very post-apocalyptic.

KORINE Yeah, a bit dystopian, post-apocalyptic for sure.

OBRIST You’ve said that you have recurrent elements in your films—images of the ocean, guns, marginalized characters, and laughing. Can you talk a little bit about these four elements?

KORINE There are just certain images, now looking back, that I have always been obsessed with. I think they are built into my subconscious. I don't even know where they come from or how to explain them. But, there are definitely themes and images in all the films and artwork I’ve been repeating for years. They are probably things that I love.

OBRIST The film and paintings remind me a lot of what I saw when I visited your studio in Miami: the boats, the water. Miami has had an influence on your current work, but I was wondering why you originally moved there.

KORINE [points to view] Well, look at the view! I always loved Florida in general. I always thought it was the most interesting state in the Union. But Miami, specifically to me, feels like a city of the future. The city is built into the ocean, so it's like a floating metropolis. And it's culturally all over the place. It's closer to Latin America than it is to conventional America. For me, it is mostly about the vibe here: the way things look and feel, the way cultures are mashed up. That’s why it has inspired a lot of the work in the last decade. Miami has extreme wealth and then extreme poverty, and then everyone is rubbing up against each other. And both those worlds influence each other. You have high culture and low culture. It's also a city that exists without irony. Even the hipsters here drive Range Rovers.

OBRIST And you have a lot of technologists in Miami.

KORINE There are a lot of people that are working on tech innovation and game development. We have hired a lot of them. Miami has become a real cultural mecca for that.

OBRIST As you know, I'm very interested in this idea of artists making video games—not only making work inspired by the aesthetic of video games, but actually making video games. I curated this exhibition, WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, which started at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf. And now, it’s on view at the Centre Pompidou Metz. And we are gonna show your work there. It’s an exhibition of more than thirty artists who all either invent games or work with video games. So, I am very curious if you have any plans to do your own video game.

KORINE That's pretty much all I've been working on besides the paintings. We have three crazy games that are in development. And actually, what I'm sending you for your show is a first glimpse at this game that we're going to introduce called Baby Invasion. It will have a live-action component. It's all about home invasions. And it's a game we've been developing for like a year. We're working on a first-person shooter. We have one role-playing game being developed, and then a really wild mobile game.

OBRIST And for the exhibition, you're going to send a teaser, or prelude, of the game. It will be in a series of light boxes with moving images, which are going to change all the time.

11 Aug 2023 / page 1 of 3Harmony Korine (b. 1973)UOU2023Oil on canvas123.8 x 183.5 x 4.1 cm / 48 3/4 x 72 1/4 x 1 5/8inchesKORIH125550Harmony Korine (b. 1973)MANT1X FAZE2023Oil on canvas179.7 x 122.6 x 4.1 cm / 70 3/4 x 48 1/4 x 1 5/8inchesKORIH125543

KORINE The lightboxes will have these digital black and white silhouettes of the characters doing home invasions. They will run simultaneously. They're very beautiful, very haunting, kind of violent, but extremely exciting. I'm going to send them to you probably in the next day or two. We're putting them on a loop so that they never end.

OBRIST One thing we didn't talk about, which is always in my interviews, is unrealized projects. Architects sometimes publish unrealized projects because they do competitions, but we don't know much about filmmakers’ or visual artists’ unrealized projects. And the range, or scope, of unrealized projects can be pretty wide: either the project is too big, too expensive, too utopic, or too time-intensive to be realized. The late composer [György] Ligeti said he had forty to fifty years of music to write. And then, other projects might be self-censored or simply are censored. Can you tell me about one or two of your favorite unrealized projects?

KORINE I used to dream of putting a book together called Commercial Failures. I spent a lot of years working in advertising. In the very beginning, I was obsessed with this idea of radical advertising and trying to infiltrate the mainstream. I think I lost hundreds of jobs because the ideas were too subversive, or strange, or outside the box. But, some of the most interesting things of mine that were never realized were commercial failures. They failed to even become commercial. I have another movie called The Trap that I was about to make. We got very close—then the film collapsed within a couple of weeks of principal photography. That's something I would probably turn into a game. We've already been talking about how to create the whole thing in Unreal Engine or use a gaming engine to create the film itself.

OBRIST Do you have a script for The Trap?

KORINE We had the actors, the script, we had the whole thing. It was probably my largest budget up to that point. I spent a solid two years prepping it, and then at least half a year just drawing the storyboards. I have thousands of pages of boards—from the first frame to the final frame. Then, there was an issue with an actor at the last second. He couldn't be in the film, and then everyone's schedules collapsed, and the whole film was nixed at the last second. But it's probably my favorite thing that I've written. It's a revenge film that takes place in Miami. People have been trying to get me to come back to it, or maybe turn it into a book.

OBRIST One of the things that has been very important to you is publishing. We talked a lot about your fanzines when we met in the ’90s. You also have some amazing artist books. Is publishing still relevant to you? Are you working on any books related to the film and the show?

KORINE Yes, I need your help, Hans. (laughs) I have a pretty significant-sized archive. There's a lot of text and writing that I guess should be fanzines. Also, there are a lot of books in there that I just never published; just because I'm too lazy to finish things, or life gets the best of me.

OBRIST You mentioned that some ads were too radical to be realized. But you have realized quite a lot of ads and you told me that they were fun to do because it’s a sort of language. It’s interesting because a lot of great little films have been made out of advertisements. For example, [Federico] Fellini created a beautiful commercial for Barilla noodles. It's one of my favorite advertisements of all time. Can you tell me about one or two of your favorite ads that you have realized?

KORINE I've done a lot of fashion. I worked with Gucci, Valentino, YSL—those are all fun. But I have also done things for 7-Eleven and Velveeta Cheese. I love them all. I've always liked advertising because it's a technical exercise and it's a way to tell a story in a very short period and you can be very creative. Advertising, in a lot of ways, has influenced the live action and art just because they can become quite experimental.

OBRIST What did you do for 7-Eleven?

KORINE I did an ad for their Slurpee. I made it look really delicious. (laughs)

OBRIST Something that I always felt has gone missing, but is now coming back is the relationship of art and poetry. And one of the least known publicized aspects of your practice is the fact that you are a poet. Can you talk a little bit about this? Have you made any recent poetry? And what's the role of poetry in your practice? Who are some of your favorite poets?

KORINE I love poetry. I love Richard Brautigan and sometimes it's just a couple of words on a page. I just love the way that certain words fall on top of each other. Even the way letters look and the way that certain things sound. Poetry is such a maligned art form now. It’s strange, but can poetry compete with Twitter? At the same time, there is this interesting thing about the idea of putting disconnected words and letters, seemingly randomly, to discover the meaning and context. And I like what's not said. For me, it's poetry, horror films, rap music—they're transgressive and it can be exciting.

OBRIST The 20th-century poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote this really beautiful book full of advice for a young poet. I think a lot of students will read our interview, so I am wondering, what would be your 2023 advice to a young artist, painter, or filmmaker? Or maybe a game inventor.

KORINE It's hard because I'm not that smart and I never took advice when I was a kid. I would just say: look at the world, look at what's out there. Maybe we're living in a moment that's post-meaning; maybe it's impossible for anything to have a real impact in the way that it used to. I'm not sure. But I think in a lot of ways, it's never been a more interesting time to be creative than it is now. People romance the past but in a lot of ways the past sucked. You were so limited in how you could put things out. There were so many gatekeepers, and naysayers, and so many people that put up blockades that you really, really, really had to be creative to get your work out. There are so many avenues now where you can release work that there's really no excuse. The hard part, though, because there's so much out there, is how do you cut through the noise and how do you make something that affects the culture? The advice I would give is to look and see what's out there, see what's missing, and then see what you can add to the equation, and then just be bold. If you believe in it, never stop.

TORBJORN RODLAND

May 11, 2025

Norwegian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer TORBJØRN RØDLAND has been creating images that pervert and sabotage the medium via tableaux rife with symbolism. They are suggestive, ominous, backlit hallucinations of the unconscious - at times violent and horrifying and other times his phantasmagoric scenes are desperate pleas for surrender and tender forgiveness, a begging and praying for touch, to belong, and to exist. This summer, there are three major exhibitions of Rødland’s work: The Touch That Made You at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Fifth Honeymoon at Bergen Kunsthall, and Backlit Rainbow at David Kordansky Gallery, his first significant solo exhibition in Los Angeles. On the occasion of these exhibitions, we present two interviews of one of the most important practitioners of postmodern photography.

BL Studies, 2016-2018 Chromogenic print, Kodak Endura paper 57 x 45 cm Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Definitely. It was the whole idea of handling popular iconography. I thought it was strange to be an artist and a photographer and just ignore that side of photography. It made a lot of sense to me to go into popular forms. I thought it was limiting to pretend to just analyze them from a distance. The Pictures Generation represented a perfect historical project. I could move photography in a more sentimental or psychological or bodily direction – risk losing that critical distance, to go beyond the established, to find places in between subject and object, a presence that’s beyond the dead thing in front of you on the table.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There seems to be something else in the images open to interpretation.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I think it’s important not to give too much away, to pull people in. That’s my goal: to achieve that quality in an image that I feel is beyond my understanding, but where I know that there’s something to understand, something that feels not random, but of importance.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Did that articulate itself from the beginning?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: It was there from the start. With In a Norwegian Landscape I learned to control the image formally. And then Close Encounter represents exercising that control almost too tightly. I would go to the location three times: first to find it, then I’d go back when the light was ideal, and then a third time with a model. And I knew pretty much what she was going to do there, how she was going to sit. It was more about execution. But then I broke with that also in 1997 and started working more spontaneously. I still do the casting, choose clothes, and set the stage, but I don’t know exactly what the outcome will be. It’s more of a back and forth. I’m very open to unexpected things that happen.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: The Serpentine exhibition has several tropes that recur within the works. In that sense, it’s very much a survey of your work.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: That’s part of the joy of putting together a show like this, or an extensive book. I’m also discovering these links. When I’m working, I don’t necessarily see them until the work is done and I look back at it. The process isn’t really finished until the show is up and you can study it all.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Some of your images self-reflect on the medium. Can you talk about that?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I think that’s very much my background. Most of the images have a self-reflective aspect. It’s important to help their reading. We don’t have the safety net of an explanation. There’s an element that’s relatable but also one that’s abstract and hard to pin down. This is all a reaction to postmodern language-consciousness.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: How do you choose your objects and models?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: It’s an exploration. It can be an object that stops me: I don’t know what it has but I’d like to find out. If I know exactly why I want to photograph an object, if it’s predictable how it will turn out, how the resulting image will be read, well, then it’s less interesting to me. In similar ways, you could read my portraits [Four Words, 2005] with words or paint on them as violating the individual, but I see them as a violation or a challenge to the tradition of portraiture. I want to make portraits that point to something beyond the individual and so I’m drawn to people whom I think can help me achieve that.

Shower Head, 2016-2018 Chromogenic print, Kodak Endura paper,45 x 57 cm, Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There are quite a lot of images where there’s an object and there’s a portrait — these kinds of non-equilibrium situations. Is there a relation to Surrealism?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: There probably is. It’s not something that I’ve studied a lot. But if you go into Surrealism, there are probably a lot of parallels when it comes to finding and exploring these in-between spaces.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: When explaining the title of your exhibition, The Touch That Made You, you say that we’re to some degree a result of how we’re seen, how we’re held, and how we’re touched. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the notion of touch and why you decided to use that as the title of your show.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I like a title to have different layers of meaning, in similar ways to a photograph. The title of this show can point to the analog processes: the touch of the camera, the touch of the light hitting the film, the touch of the liquids running over the film during processing. And I’m linking that to the stickiness and intimacy of certain motifs — these encounters between two individuals or between objects and bodies. On a psychological level, the way we’re held and protected or touched in our childhood is crucial to the psyche and personality and the issues we’re left to deal with for the rest of our lives.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: This brings us to your process of working. You work with analog, not digital photography. The layers of meaning in your photographs are staged and constructed. How do you feel this is more achievable through analog rather than digital?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I’m sure layers of meaning can be constructed digitally but I’m equally drawn to layers of non-meaning — to feeling, to presence, to projection and identification. And I’m more successful in creating images that resonate with me on a deeper level when I work with less overview and control, when there’s an element of surprise or even disbelief in seeing the results, the contact sheets, from a photographic session. The liquid process also makes a lot of sense to me. So yes, I work on film and I have analog contact sheets made. Then I make quick digital snaps of selected frames on the contact sheet and look at them and group them together on a laptop. I don’t really see the image in its full quality until I decide to print it. Seeing the big print can be a very positive experience. Finally I get to see what I did. It can be several years later.

Candles and Cubes, 2016 Chromogenic print on Kodak Endura paper mounted on dibond, 62.2 x 78.1 x 3.8 cm Qiao Zhibing’s Collection Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles CA

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And then there are your films. In the exhibition, we’re presenting 132 BPM (2005). You made films between 2004 and 2007, but not since.

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Exactly. It’s been ten years and I’m trying to make a new one now. Installing my first survey show at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo in 2003 made it clear to me how coherent my project had been. I’d realized almost every photographic curiosity in nature; the forest had been my stage. That survey show, titled Grave with a View, led to bigger changes. I felt the need to expand the circle more. First I made a solo show with only black and white photography and then, later in 2003, I wrote the script for my first film The Exorcism of Mother Teresa (2004). While filming I realized that I didn’t want to use a script in the future, but my initial impulse was: I need this! It seemed like a very difficult thing to do — to put together a small movie. 132 BPM is a good example of how I use the medium to explore movement, interval, and temporality — qualities I do not get to explore that explicitly in still photography. So it’s still an exploration of the photographic medium but with different parameters. 132 BPM is the result of me spending a month in Croatia with a metronome and an iPod with a playlist where every song is exactly 132 beats per minute. And then I applied this rhythm to my temporary surroundings. I spent two weeks casting and finding locations and two weeks filming every day and editing a little every night. The whole film was built during those four weeks.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And the soundtrack?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: I walked into the only record store in Rijeka and it happened to play a new album by a French duo called Sex in Dallas and it was very, very close to what I’d imagined as a soundtrack. So I contacted them and after doing the first edit of the film, I spent some time in Berlin with them making the music. Then everything came together. There’s an original soundtrack to all the films except for one. And I tried something slightly different in each movie. There’s one called Blues for Bigfoot (2005) that in method is almost a documentary, while the first one, The Exorcism of Mother Teresa is closer to a horror film. The last one I did, I Am Linkola (2007), also has a techno soundtrack.

Headphones, 2016-2018 Chromogenic print, Kodak Endura paper,140 x 110 cm Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And the new film is going to be your first film in Los Angeles?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Yes, in the city of movies!

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: That leads us to the question: how has LA influenced your work since you moved there? Do you have any sense of how your images or motifs have moved between and adjusted to a different cultural flow?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: This is something I do see in my work: there’s this mix between Nordic melancholia, Japanese cuteness, and American vulgarity – different image traditions corresponding to different sides of me. It’s harder to point to what has changed lately because of Los Angeles.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: That’s a great conclusion before my final question: do you have any dream projects you haven’t been able to realize?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: Typically, I don’t start with a very big idea that I then have to downscale for them to be realistic. I get ideas from what I see around me and objects that are available. It’s based more on seeing the potential in the everyday than on downscaling something overly ambitious.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: What would your advice be for a young photographer/artist?

TORBJØRN RØDLAND: If there’s something they want to do, then that’s what they should focus on. There’s this tendency to try to navigate and orientate towards what’s being made at the moment, but it’s important to be brave enough to do something that doesn’t seem to fit in the here and now – as long as we agree to avoid nostalgia.

Excerpt from the publication “Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You” published by Fondazione Prada, Milano 2018.

HERON PRESTON

May 11, 2025

HANS ULRICH OBRIST You have many dimensions to your work: you’re an artist, a creative director, a designer, a DJ. What was the first of all these many roles you started?

HERON PRESTON I guess it started in school—it’s skateboarding, it’s music, it’s all of these different avenues of culture that I was embracing. I would start to make friends with kids who were listening to the same things as me or skateboarding. I started doing projects with friends, and one of those projects turned out to be the very first time I started to place my name on garments: Heron Preston. It was a t-shirt, and this was back when I had just graduated high school in 2001. I wanted the brand to sound prestigious because I was elevating t-shirts into a more premium space. My name is Heron Johnson, but my middle name is Preston, and that sounded so fancy to me. The first logo that I had developed was in cursive, and it had two cherubs with wings. My grandfather is a preacher and an artist; he would paint scriptures on canvas. I would see a lot of imagery of angels and cherubs in my house. My slogan was “Live Above Mediocrity,” which I got tattooed. It was my first tattoo because I heard a preacher say that. Then I had discovered a screenprinter in San Francisco that was printing all of the merchandise for skateboard brands, and in the corner they had a four color press that was all manual. They gave me my first opportunity to screenprint.

HUO I have had many conversations with Virgil [Abloh] in the last couple of years, and he said everything started with t-shirts—in a very DIY way. It’s exactly the same for you.

HP Yeah, it was exactly the same for me. That was the very beginning of all of this. San Francisco was very DIY, and I was learning as I went. I was working at a retail shop. It was kind of like the Colette of San Francisco at its time, and it was a very tiny boutique. But then, I moved to New York. I got accepted into Parsons. I thought that since I was making t-shirts, I should then go and study fashion design. As a core fashion designer, I felt like I had ideas, and I really wanted to figure out ways to bring those to life through any type of medium. It didn’t really have to be restricted to fashion, so I didn’t do fashion design at Parsons. I studied design and management, and graduated with a business degree from an art school.

HUO Who are some other people who inspired you? Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ stance is very interesting in terms of thinking with Sylvia Wynter. We can think with other people in our work. So, the question is less by who are you influenced, but with whom have you been thinking?

HP It was a man by the name of Darrel Rhea. He was introduced at a talk as a futurist and an innovator. This was a talk about design, and the best design according to him was design that was meaningful. He wrote a book called Making Meaning. According to him, the best design is understanding the desires of human beings and that’s how you make meaning. He was redesigning Australia’s tax system at the time, and that had totally changed my entire outlook on what design was. I thought design was just fashion design, or interior design, or graphic design. I thought it was only playing with color, or materials, but I learned from him that design was also a form of organization. After I heard him speak, I emailed him, and was like, “Hey, I want to learn from you. I want you to be my mentor.” As I grew into my career in New York City, we always stayed in touch.

Working at Nike, I just didn’t feel like I was growing. So I wrote to Darrel, and I asked him what I should do next. He asked me, “Are you interested in continuing to apply your design and innovation only to art and fashion, or are you interested in applying your design and innovation to a wicked issue?” At the time he was working in the healthcare industry, which needed a lot of help in redesigning the way medical records are shared amongst doctors. He called that a wicked issue. He challenged me, “Do you want to continue applying this to art and fashion, or would you like to design with purpose?” After a year of really thinking about what the answer would be, I stumbled on this beach in Ibiza. I went swimming and this plastic bag was floating in the ocean toward me. I thought it was a jellyfish at first. But once it got closer, I realized it was garbage. All of a sudden the stars aligned, and the answer struck: holy shit, the environment is the wicked issue. I really love nature. I grew up in San Francisco—going on camping trips in Muir Woods, Marin Headlands, and Squaw Valley in Tahoe. So, when I saw litter within a natural environment, I was like, man, I want to start to clean up beaches. I want to start to clean up my own city. And as a designer, I also really love workwear, I love uniforms, and so it all started to hit me: the environment, work uniforms, and then I immediately thought about, as a design project, approaching the Department of Sanitation in New York City to do a collaboration to help clean up the environment.

HUO That must’ve been a major revelation in your life because everything unfolded from that. Before you started your own brand, UNIFORM, Kanye West also played a role. I’m always fascinated because in every art movement there are these offices of professionals who sort of become a school. Not only a school—Andy Warhol had the Factory. I was also trying to find out what it is about Kanye that makes him so inspiring for the people who work with him.

HP When I left Nike, I started working for Kanye. I was a creative director on his internal team called Donda for two years. That’s also where Virgil worked. What’s fascinating about working with Kanye is that he is able to really harness the purity of youth. He’s able to really harness the purity of that point of creation—you embrace risk-taking, you really love to push boundaries, and you love to be playful with your ideas. Working at Nike and other corporations was very safe. But with Kanye, anything is possible. He really empowers everyone around him. I think when you get thrown into the fire like that, you automatically start to grow this second skin or this superpower of learning faster than if you had to teach yourself.

HUO When I did this conversation with Kanye and Jacques Herzog, what I was so excited by is this idea of eternal learning, of eternal curiosity. That’s something I always believed in, which is why I do these interviews. We can always learn so many things.

HP Curiosity has always guided my process. I remember the first day on the job at Nike, I left my desk, and when I came back there was a printout that said: “Once you lose your curiosity, it’s over.” At that moment, I realized why they really wanted me within my role as the marketing strategist. That’s always driven how I make design decisions, and I think that’s also how I’ve been as a little kid with friendships. I was on the chess team, I was the class president, but then I was also an athlete. I think it’s because I was the only child that wanted to make friends with people and discover different cultures. Curiosity is a huge aspect of the qualities that Ye has, that I have, that really guide our creativity and interests.

HUO All these experiences coalesce into these collections you launch. You launched UNIFORM in New York and then a year later you went to Moscow with it, then to Paris. Can you tell me a little bit about these collections and how different they were, and also it’s a very unexpected context to connect fashion, ecology, zero waste, upcycling, recycling with the Department of Sanitation. Fifteen years ago in Zurich there was a sanitation museum, and I curated a show there called Cloaca Maxima about art and sanitation, and I always thought it was so great because whenever an artist, or visitor arrived, they would send someone from the staff in a sanitation uniform to pick the people up.

HP Uniforms have always been a big inspiration of mine. I was really fascinated with the Department Of Sanitation. I felt like everything at the time was so predictable. I was also really inspired by Matthew Barney and his River of Fundament in Detroit. It was a whole day of performances. First, we were escorted down to the theater at the Detroit Museum to watch the film—a car crashes into the river, and then the film abruptly stops. Then, we’re all escorted into a tour bus and driven through downtown Detroit, then we’re escorted into a glue factory where this woman performs, and then we’re escorted into a barge on the river where we’re watching this performance, and then we’re escorted into a car factory, and then there’s this big explosion and the show finishes.

This was an entire performance where he took over Detroit and he coordinated with the police department, he coordinated with the mayor’s office, he coordinated with all the city agencies, and I thought that was just so powerful. I wanted to do my own version of a city takeover. I thought that if I put my uniforms on the back of nine thousand sanitation workers around New York City, I would have that same impact that Matthew Barney had on me. That’s why I really wanted to work with the Department of Sanitation as well, to show the crossover between art and government—shining a positive light on sanitation workers. So, it was these tones of humanitarianism, social structures, and the environment. It was my first time even learning about upcycling. I wanted to just do a project using secondhand t-shirts that would become uniforms for all of the workers. It was all about recovering waste and giving it a second life; this secondhand first philosophy. I really took my creativity and my design to new levels through this project.

HUO An artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who is now in her eighties..

HP I had no idea about her! I started researching the Department of Sanitation, and I saw there was a talk happening at the New York City Museum. It was being hosted by a woman named Robin Nagle who is the in-house anthropologist for the Department of Sanitation. She wrote a book called Picking Up: [On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City] where she basically took the test to become a sanitation worker just so she could study them. She had a talk and told the story of New York City’s relationship with waste management. The city’s waste management agency goes back to the 1800s. There was a prominent figure who was a doctor, and he made the connection between cleanliness and health. He said that if we clean up the city, and we start an agency, we will save more lives. That’s why the Department of Sanitation’s logo is a caduceus, which is that cross that has the snake going around it. When we got to the 1980s in the book, Mierle [Laderman] comes along in her story. Mierle shook the hands of every worker in New York City. It took her one year, and as she did, she said, “Thank you for keeping the city alive.”

HUO It’s called Touch Sanitation. And she shook 8,500 employees' hands.

HP When I learned about this work, I was like, Oh my god! They have an artist there? I need to meet her! She’s going to be the one to understand what I would like to do. I reached out to Robin to introduce me to Mierle. She told me no because she didn’t know who I was. She was very protective of Mierle. So, a couple years later at NADA, I stumbled on another talk. When I look at the projector, I see a photo of Mierle and her Touch Sanitation project. The woman who was presenting Mierle’s work was named Diya Vij who works in the Public Arts in Residence in New York City, called PAIR. I walked up to Diya after her talk and said, “Hey, the woman that you’re talking about, Mierle, I need to meet her. I have a big idea that I would love to present to her. Can you introduce me?” They called me in for a meeting and I presented this idea of recovering waste and doing a secondhand uniform project to raise money for the city. There was this charity component as well because city budgets always get cut. So, if there was a way for the city to raise money, they might approve the project. Funny enough, the DSNY had always wanted to do a fashion show because out of all the agencies within New York City, like the Fire Department, the Police Department, New Yorkers always talk shit about sanitation workers. They hate when a garbage truck is blocking traffic, but imagine what would happen if no one picked up your trash.

HUO The city would collapse.

HP Because of that, the DSNY has always been the coolest agency. They were like, “Hey, would you like to do a fashion show together?” And I was like, “Of course! That’s what I’ve been wanting to do with you guys.” I really wanted this to be a performance like Mierle’s. Through this project, I was able to invite New Yorkers into restricted city access zones like the Salt Shed, which is where we had the performance. That Salt Shed houses nine thousand tons of salt for the winter season and is only accessed during the winter. I also brought out Mierle’s truck—it was in the 1983 New York Art Fair Parade. That truck was all about the reflection of New Yorkers, so she outfitted the truck with mirrors. The whole idea was to see yourself in the garbage truck, and the whole meaning was that we’re all in this together. When you throw your trash away, it doesn’t just end there. So I put her work in my show, I put recycled electronic waste in my show, I worked with different city agencies, I brought bales of old clothes from the Goodwill, I worked with Housing Works to bring in electronic waste, I worked with Sims, which is North America's largest recycling facility and is based here in Brooklyn in Sunset Park, so it was a really big citywide initiative. At the event, you had models and cool people like Virgil, but then you had sanitation workers, and you would never see that at a fashion event. Ever. It was so cool to see my friends mingling with city workers.

HUO The question now is of scale, and in terms of your most frequently quoted quote: “Harness the power of fashion to design a better future.” That leaves us the question: what can then really change mainstream fashion brands? And that brings me to a recent collaboration you’re doing with Calvin Klein. How can you add sustainability to such a large brand? I read that they use raw denim, which uses less water, but there must be more to it, no?

HP It was a really small team. The rest of the company didn’t even know that we were working on this project, so we were able to identify new factories that were vetted, carve out our own supply chain, and activate those factories, and that supply chain. I like to call it our value chain. The very first day that I got in, I started looking at their packaging and it’s all plastic. We then changed all of the plastic packaging into recyclable and biodegradable materials. Then looking at the materials: I decided to do raw denim to save us water, but it also allows the wearer to personalize it. Also, not using too many logos, so that you can make it yours. I’m really big with authenticity and responding to the desires of the community. It’s not that typical approach to picking models or faces. I have people who are known for breaking boundaries, rising stars in culture, and fresh faces. I could’ve done a sanitation-worker-inspired collection and wouldn’t have even had to work with the Department of Sanitation, but would it have been authentic? That was the same with Calvin Klein. What is the core of Calvin Klein? It’s the underwear—a three-pack of white t-shirts—so I started to build it from there in respect of the brand, but in respect of the environment as well.

HUO The architect Peter Smithson always said there is a kind of thing and it’s found. That seems to be a part of your work—you find stuff. I’ve been wearing your coat with the safety belt a lot. What’s the ready-made dimension of the work?

HP I think it’s shining a light on the overlooked and recontextualizing it. It’s about the curiosity of pointing my finger at things I find fascinating, and bringing my friends or my community along the way. It’s about designing or creating these worlds and inviting someone into this world. To experience a kind of a world I would love to live in.

HUO On Instagram, you are often referencing health and culture, animals, and of course seeing these animals in the work, the heron, your namesake, makes us think about extinction because we are living in an age of climate emergency, but actually it’s a mass extinction. And you work with the Audubon [Society], so I want to hear more about that, and your work with animals, and animals through these manifesto type of t-shirts.

HP My father, who is a retired San Francisco police officer, started a program called Operation Dream, which was a program with the SFPD that would give young kids from public housing the opportunity to go and explore their surroundings. They would take kids on camping trips, skiing trips, and white water rafting trips. Or they would take them to woodworking classes, and arts and crafts. My dad was always bringing me on those trips. When I think of growing up in San Francisco, we were surrounded by beautiful parks. Golden Gate Park is in the heart of San Francisco, and I was always visiting these parks. I grew up with a fascination with nature. I’d be volunteering at the Discovery Museum in San Francisco. I remember seeing a great blue heron in Marin when I was about twelve years old, and I took a photo on my disposable camera. I always loved that I had the same name as this bird. I really wanted to put this Audubon painting on the collection as this introduction to the meaning of my name, and my love of nature. It brings some balance into the fashion imagery within streetwear, where you see a lot of graffiti, and you see a lot of references to the streets, but I wasn’t necessarily finding any connections to nature in a cool way. I wanted to do it through the context of a skater.

HUO Orange is the color of your brand, the labels are in orange. I was kind of wondering because I always see orange as a DIY color, but I was wondering what orange means for you.

HP Orange is a very powerful color. It’s super powerful. You don’t need to use a lot for someone to notice it. The season one collection, I was putting orange on everything, then I would step back, and I would see too much orange. Over the seasons, you see me using less and less, and almost reducing it only to the label. On the heron bird, you see a little bit of orange within their beaks. So, there’s that connection to nature. A lot of workwear agencies use orange labels. The DSNY had orange labels as well. It’s the color of safety and PPE, and you see that color orange being used for street signs, or orange cones. It’s this notice-me color. On the Calvin Klein collection, you’ll get these little hints of orange, and it worked because in paparazzi photos, celebrities wearing the collection, with these long lenses, you can still see that little, tiny bit of orange from like a million miles away, and you know that it’s my collection without even seeing the Calvin Klein logo.

HUO Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this book called Letters to a Young Poet. I’m sure a lot of young designers and students will read this interview—what would you advise them?

HP Protect yourself. Have people around you who can protect you, and never give up. Remain curious, challenge yourself, and have fun along the way. And innovate. Look to do something new. I love that Miles Davis quote: “Play what’s not being played.”

HUO We always know about architects’ unrealized projects because they publish them, and very little fashion design or visual artists’, musicians’, composers’, poets’ unrealized projects are published. Do you have any dreams or projects you haven’t been able to do yet that you want to realize in the future?

HP Right now, I’m looking to develop new materials. I really want to be a source for young designers material-wise. Looking at circularity in fashion and design. I want to position myself as that voice, so beyond just selling fashion, can I sell materials? Can I develop my own materials? When you look at materials, you have Gore-Tex, and then you have Zebrum and other materials you don’t really know about. So, looking at developing my own materials but then inviting other brands and other designers to use Heron Preston materials. I have something I’m developing now. I would love to have my own garden one day, my own type of park, for example.

HUO What would your garden look like?

HP My garden would have a lot of trees, and bushes, and flowers, and it would feel like an enchanted forest. A lot of overhanging trees, and branches, and benches to sit, and maybe a pond. I would have amazing birds that would live there. I really wanted to start a farm as well, where I could then start to grow my own cotton, or my own hemp, and develop my own bed and breakfast. Over the pandemic, I was wanting to be out as far away from the coronavirus as possible. I was fascinated with farms because they’re very resourceful and self-sufficient: you have your own food, you have your own resources, and then you have nature. One of my unrealized projects is to start a farm, and then a sculpture garden where I can invite my friends outside of New York City to come and escape. I think it’s all about having an escape within nature.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST You . have many dimensions to your work: you’re an artist, a creative director, a designer, a DJ. What was the first of all these many roles you started?

HUO I have had many conversations with Virgil [Abloh] in the last couple of years, and he said everything started with t-shirts—in a very DIY way. It’s exactly the same for you.

HUO An artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who is now in her eighties...

HUO It’s called Touch Sanitation. And she shook 8,500 employees' hands.

HUO The city would collapse.

HUO Orange is the color of your brand, the labels are in orange. I was kind of wondering because I always see orange as a DIY color, but I was wondering what orange means for you.

HUO Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this book called Letters to a Young Poet. I’m sure a lot of young designers and students will read this interview—what would you advise them?

HUO What would your garden look like?

“ATROCITY EXHIBITION"

May 11, 2025

Photography: Mat + Kat Styling: Aleksandra Koj & Kristina Koelle Makeup: Laramie , Production: Kendall Thompson

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I wanted to begin with the beginning. I wanted to ask you how it all began, how you came to art, or how art came to you?

RON ATHEY I'd say that the music scene in Los Angeles had a lot of crossover with the art scene—being part of the late '70s, early ‘80s punk scene, and post-punk scene. I saw the work of Johanna Went, and experimental, mutated, classical groups, like Fat & Fucked Up. I always wondered how I could work this into performance. So, I always thought of the live image from the beginning. A punk show is an unlikely place to see a performance artist. And, I know there were parallel scenes in different cities.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And was there an epiphany, or as you would call it, a dissociative sparkle?

RON ATHEY Yes. [laughs] The first performance in 1980 with my partner, Rozz Williams (founder of Christian Death)—as soon as it started, I felt this kind of trance. I never had questions, like, why am I doing this? What am I going for? It had logic right away for me. It was the right fit because I could expand within that framework. It’s an enhanced state. So, that's what hooked me in—looking for that state again in different ways.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST You read Octavia Butler's “Parable of the Sower,” set in a very dystopian future where she starts channeling a new religion. And that's what you're obsessed with, channelers, and the messianic complex. And that moment the pressure hits; the critical point. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, this idea of channeling a new religion? Because of course, you had a very strict religious upbringing, which I suppose continues to be present.

RON ATHEY It does. And while I use all of that language, I am a little bit more like Nietzsche about that. I think that we have to remake new celebrations and maybe even try to call it something different, but I'm not afraid of still understanding that on some level I'm a Christian, because I'm wired as a Christian. I still visit churches. I still go to Orthodox Easter when I'm in Thessaloniki. I'm still curious all the time about what that impulse is and the belief, particularly the more mystical and metaphysical chapters of that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I would like to hear more about your current relationship to theology. And whom are you reading right now?

RON ATHEY Right now, I'm reading the writings of Vampira. There’s a new book her niece put out. When she was still alive, she gave readings at clubs near my house called “How to dig your own grave with your mouth.” And I’m reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which has the essay about Wagner, but then it goes into the broader forum because I'm working on a concept about the Asclepeion and about healing chambers, dream chambers, the baths—in a fictional way, or as a starting point, anyway.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I was wondering about who your influences and inspirations might be, but maybe it's actually not so much influence. I read this extraordinary book, Dub, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It's about Silvia Wynter and this idea that she has not so much been an influence on Gumbs, but rather that Gumbs has been thinking with Sylvia Wynter. So, I was wondering, who are the artists from the past and present you are thinking with or working with?

RON ATHEY I think my dilemma when I was a teenager was that I had this kind of angst that could have destroyed me. I went down a real Francophile channel. It started with Jean Genet, and eventually went to Bataille, but I had to understand that in history, ideas out of sync with the dominant culture existed, not just the gay, but also the pervert, or the abject. So, I was kind of looking for answers to exist. And within that, the poetry of Our Lady of the Flowers (1943)—I read all the plays, the five novels—and screamed when Prisoner of Love (1986) was released because of what it really contained.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And you are self-taught. Can you speak a little bit about this idea of DIY in relation to art? I learned about artists by doing studio visits. I never studied art history. I studied economy and ecology. It came out of conversations, and studio visits, and seeing artists work. So, if you could talk a little bit about this DIY thing, of being self-taught,.

RON ATHEY I do feel fortunate. I had that DIY aesthetic really ingrained in me, so I don't fear somebody who is a master at a certain skill. It's more of how it butts together. An early person I worked with is Julie Tolentino—when she was doing choreography and dancing with David Roussève’s company [REALITY Dance and Theater Group founded in Los Angeles in 1988]. I really learned about movement and the connective tissue within a piece, and also how to structure grandiosity. I worked with the opera singer, Juliana Snapper, and Opera Povera director, Sean Griffin, who I still collaborate with. At first, I wanted an opera singer in a piece and she was like, “No, stand in the nook of the piano.” And we spent two years helping me have opera strength, even if I don't have opera talent. We made a duet called The Judas Cradle (2004-2005). I think fearlessness and doing the research is important. I spent a lot of time in the UC San Diego music library, which has a massive musicology department. Diamanda Galás comes from there as well. The curve ball on these classical arts is so inspiring. And you know, when I lived in England, if someone got the Arts Council grant, they made the piece. If they didn't, they'd be like, you know, I’ll wait for the next cycle. I would never wait for money. Never wait to be curated, never wait to be shown. If you have a burning concept in you, find the place and produce it yourself, I still do that. I'm doing it right now. I made a video about the myth of Acéphale and I did a fundraiser for it, selling t-shirts. I successfully did all of it in two weeks.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST What’s on the t-shirts?

RON ATHEY The Solar Anus, which is based on the Pierre Molinier mandala.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Before we look at the recent work, maybe a few questions about the older work. You mentioned the dissociative sparkle—the epiphany of 1980. But between 1980 and 1998 you had eighteen years of touring with a troupe of people, and then you became fatigued. Before we talk about this ‘98 epiphany, as you call it, the dissociative sparkle of the Solar Anus, I wanted to ask you about two or three moments between 1980 and 1998, where you felt a particularly striking dissociative sparkle.

RON ATHEY Let’s skip to ‘94, which is when the idea to make solo work came together—the piece Four scenes in a Harsh Life (1994). There's a scene called Suicide Bed, Tattoo Salvation. And it's a little story about compressing ten suicidal moments into one, and then a dream I had that my tattoos were finished. I put, like, 28 needles in my arms. Looking back on that video, I was kind of rattled by it. So, it was the first time I actually looked at something from the outside and experienced it instead of just experiencing it from being in it. That changed the way I started thinking about documentation—maybe I had to be more purist about it—it had to be the live experience.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And the fatigue led you to this first solo piece, the Solar Anus (1998), and that was inspired by the 1931 Georges Bataille essay (“The Solar Anus,” 1931), and also the action photographs of Pierre Molinier.

RON ATHEY I first saw Molinier at a festival in Nantes, just in a booth there, in the early ‘90s. So, I pursued seeing shows of his whenever they would pop up in that era. I had read the Bataille essay a bit earlier and it was very visual, so I connected with it. I still think that sometimes when you make a piece, it just comes together, which was the case with Solar Anus. I made it in two weeks, even the crown and the shoes. Then, I brought all of that stuff to Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, which is the first place I did it. It was embodying this kind of twisted Sun King, which has a little bit of the legends and Dietrich [von Bern] in it too. Somehow, it was all of these characters coming to create a new one.

It’s very different trying to control something that's closer to theater—trying to control ten people on stage. You know, I don't use a script, but I do have an outline of the order that things go in. It was the most present performance piece. The dissociative sparkle, like when I first started using that term was with Incorruptible Flesh. I only did two durational pieces that were six hours, one in Glasgow as a challenge from Nikki Milliken who curated The National Review Of Live Art. Basically, people could touch me for six hours. And I went to hell and back, and hell and back, and hell and back. It's not my medium to work in, but because I committed to it, I did it twice, and it was interesting.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST In “A Polemic of Blood” in 2015, you said, “Suddenly the topics were extreme beauty, finding context for a live (self) sex action, and deeper exploration into using hypnosis via soundtrack and movement articulation.” How exactly did these different topics come together?

RON ATHEY I started working with a hypnotist in the mid-nineties, just to synchronize the cast, and also to find a pace that wasn't like holding a magic wand prop, or wasn't related to butoh. It wasn't related to something else. I learned how to do that in every piece—using hypnosis to do automatic writing, to establish choreography, and then work with a musician so that it's embedded in the soundtrack for me. Then, there was just this truth that no matter what my intentions are, the polemic of the day overrides—this blood coming over the audience in the heat of the AIDs pandemic. I needed to own that it wasn't only my personal experience with HIV, with my own blood—it also carried the power and the phobia of that time.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And now, you're actually preparing your first big retrospective called Queer Communion at Participant. It's curated by the historian Amelia Jones, who also is the co-editor of the catalog. Can you tell me about this exhibition and what it means to look back? This is a retrospective of dissociative sparkles as one could call it. It would be great to hear about how you work on this, because it obviously also brings you to your archive and I've always been very interested in archives of artists. Your archive is costumes, there is, of course, documentation of your performances and soundtracks of the performances, so it's not only the visual, it's also the sound. And as you said, the archive is a shifting layer of identity politics, body art, sex acts, archetypes, the AIDS pandemic, the “polemic of blood,” deconstructing memoir and automatism. Interpreting esoteric traditions excites you more than ever. So, what is your arc of organizing, how do you work with these shifting layers, all these things, and then, if you deconstruct the memoir, you somehow also deconstruct the notion of the retrospective, I suppose?

RON ATHEY Yeah, well, maybe that's the battle with the art historian as well. There are the vitrines telling the dry story. And then, there's the things like costumes that have to come back to life, and for me, they also have to have a relevance with each other. I have such a solid archive because I always lived in the same house with a giant detached garage and I just put everything in it, but not with so much strategy. And there were a few interventions to organize my archives by The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, which also did the giant Polaroid project with Catherine Opie and me. So, that was the time when my paper archives started being organized by UCLA. And then, finally this time, I received an Owner Move-In eviction, so I had to move all this stuff. But Amilia Jones kind of intercepted it before. So, I have the Judas Cradle, which is like this huge wood prop that scaffolds costumes from every show since the early '90s. I’m also making two books with Intellect Books. I had bought some of the negatives back from '80s photographers, so I have been gathering materials since say, 2013.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST An archive always hides another archive. It’s not just one archive, it’s many.

RON ATHEY Right. There are about four rooms that go through Family, Club Years, Torture Trilogy is the AIDS years, and that will have a little tiny Jesse Helms talking. So, of course I have Senate records from the Freedom of Information Act. I have everything from different hearings, correspondence with Jane Alexander when she was the head of the National Endowment for the Arts. Opera, sheet music, pieces that I made in collaboration with a psychic outside of Manchester, like an automatic writing planchette that he made for me.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST You mentioned club culture. Last week, I had a long conversation with Honey Dijon and we talked about many different topics. In her work, there are so many layers—from the DJing, to her own music, to the fashion brand, to the activism. And one thing, which was really striking, is that it's all based on what happened in the clubs between the late ‘70s and 1983. As Honey told me, it was one of these moments when all the disciplines came together—it had to do with a community of people from many different backgrounds, many different fields. I wondered if you could talk about that, if you see it the same way?

RON ATHEY I feel like a good analysis of scenes is England's Dreaming (1991) by Jon Savage, where he analyzes the Sex Pistols, and how punk managed to remain authentic on the West Coast for nine years. And the answer is because no one cared about it. It didn't become saturated with branding and co-option. It stayed in its ghetto for so long. So, that scene was my foundation. Also, my first boyfriend was Rozz Williams—so what preceded goth in America was death rock, and that is when I started making performance, in those years. I also had some rehab years, and then back to 1989, 1990, when tattooing and piercing was sort of hitting a pitch—techno dance coming out of Detroit, Chicago, and some bands in England, like Sheep on Drugs was this new sound that became hard techno later. So, that was a very public sex kind of time, like go-go dancing—out of a long shutdown period. I wouldn't claim it as one period, even moving to London and being a part of Kaos when it was at Stunners, like there are still spots where you feel a scene and people being transformed by the scene every week that they come. Their look starts shifting and their reality cracks open. So, I wouldn't give the glory day one thing, it's just that everything cuts and pastes, and regurgitates, and comes back together.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And one thing I also wanted to ask you—that goes back to this Kembra Pfahler interview, which I did for the last issue. Kembra talks about you quite a lot in that interview. When Kembra talks about the beginnings of the performances, you know, inspired by Butoh, by Katzuo Ohno—when the transition happens, from drawing to performance quite early on—she told me it has to do with gender politics. Kembra said that “many of us felt gender fluid, but there wasn't a language for it.” And then, Kembra says “a language was born.” This idea that a language is born—it is incredibly important. Then, she says your generation—you, Bruce LaBruce, Vaginal Davis—would then find ways to articulate it. So, I wanted to throw that question back at you and see if you agree, and could you maybe give a response to Kembra?

RON ATHEY I think those were less defensive times. We were just doing our thing and creating a bit of a family around that. We all curate each other and do our own events. Me and Vaginal Davis co-curated events for fifteen years. And so Kembra and Bruce would almost always be a part of that, and sometimes other artists like Slava Mogutin. But I feel like Vag and Kembra were the linguists. They would play with words and phrases, and sometimes it would be derogatory and they would keep doing it until it refined into a new description. So, I think they are the lingual geniuses there, but there are things that then suddenly everybody needs an answer for, so you become articulate about it. I care a lot about context and logic and often go deep down those roads before I do something.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And you have also written. Can you talk about the practice of writing? You've written manifestos, you've written texts, can you give a few examples and maybe talk about what the writing means within the practice?

RON ATHEY I think I write in a formal thesis way for myself, as I'm researching and I keep adding to it. I've also worked as a journalist and I try to write about other artists as part of my practice. I'm going to edit a book of the work of Johanna Went, a monograph, so I'm working on that right now. There's never been a book on her. She's included in Cynthia Carr’s book [On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1999], and Meiling Cheng’s In Other Los Angeleses (2002) and early on in the first Re/Search books, like Industrial Culture Handbook (1983), which placed her with Throbbing Gristle, and Survival Research Laboratories, even though she did more actionist performances. For ICA London, I often wrote for their brochures, like about Marcellí Antúnez Roca, in that moment where everyone was obsessed with cybersex. I think it's an opportunity to do research. I had a column in Honcho Magazine for two years where I could write about fucking suburban guys in Orange County, or I happened to be at the Venice Biennale for two weeks and I'm going between the nude beach and the Pavilions. They gave me freedom to write about anything. I enjoyed writing that column for those two years.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And besides writing, does drawing play a role? I was looking at the Viennese actionists, like Schwarzkogler or Nitsch—I’ve interviewed Günter Brus a few years ago, his actions all came out of a very intense process of drawing. And I was wondering about the drawings in your practice.

RON ATHEY Mine is more storyboarding and writing. I'm more of an essay writer. But I only draw in the presence of the person I'm trying to communicate with—using a sketch.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And do you still sketch?

RON ATHEY Yes. I’m also doing more collaging than usual on the next concept.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST The retrospective is also a moment to think about documentation of live situational art. Tino Sehgal, for example, doesn't want his pieces to be photographed. There is a whole discussion about the documentation of live situational art, how a performance that is not documented is materially ephemeral, but it may stay with the viewers through memory. You have not rejected photographs, but it's part of your collaboration in a way, part of your community, one can say maybe a modern collaboration. And I suppose that would also play a role in the exhibition—featuring these photographers. So, I wanted to ask you about the relationship to these photographers and to photography.

RON ATHEY Photography was kind of like a mirror for me. Like another way of looking at the work. And finding the patience to stage a performance for the camera didn't come easy for me at first. I thrive on the audience, or you could call it witness feedback. So, to be alone with one person, I'll only go so far. When I did the giant Polaroids with [Catherine] Opie, there were like forty people in the room sometimes, so it felt like a performance. I have a long running relationship with Manuel Vason—I've shot with Steven Klein and Herb Ritts. And, you know, I'm a ham, I like it more as I get older, to challenge myself to still make work for the camera that way. I welcome the mediation of photography in my work—that there's something that captures some kind of perfection. Because the entire live experience isn’t perfect, but there are some things that can't be caught on camera. That's still the number one thing that drives the concept. I don't have a concept for a photograph, I have a concept for an action, and sometimes that action makes a perfect photograph at some point.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And if you have a concept for an action, how much is it scripted, and how much does improvisation and chance enter the picture? How would you describe that relationship in the performances?

RON ATHEY I think what I'm scripting is a frame. And there's always these big windows left open. It can't be like a perfect play for me. Like each space, each city, each mood has to have room to express itself. I do think it's different every time. And that's why I have to do a piece for at least three years to feel like I nailed it.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Rereading your texts, “Getting It Right … Zooming Closer” (Art Journal, 2011), you say, “Performance documentation, performance-for-the-camera, performance image for the camera, to get it right—all are editing, reducing, retouching, mediating, specifying, forcing the gaze, and not the full experience, which can essentially lie, enhance, mislead. In the 80s and 90s, I only understood how performance went off by how it felt during, and how it sat with me after. Video and photo documentation showed me that and something more… I had to adjust to the flattening. But something about what the cameraperson focused on actually made the representation more extreme because the context of setting and the sequence in which the image appeared could be removed. Zooming closer than the audience could ever get in most performances sometimes was beautiful and sometimes vulgar.” It’s a great text. So, I want to ask you about that shift in perspective, and then actually about the process, and the way in which you started seeing yourself, and your performances differently through documentation.

RON ATHEY I think I could also include critical reviews in there—being able to see in a way that I couldn't see before. I think some of it was considered the most violent work in the '90s, like men on hooks. If the camera went into the detail of the flesh tearing on one person, it would make someone sick—if you're watching live, you could always gaze somewhere else. Video, especially of a multidimensional piece is manipulative; someone's always choosing the money shot. So, I still argue that nothing's better than the live experience, but I'm aware of how ephemeral that is. I didn't want the same few people to see my work. And I do love the meditative quality of a photograph, of being able to just stare at it.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I want to ask you about two very important people in your life. You already mentioned Catherine Opie whom you've been collaborating with since the early ‘90s—for almost thirty years. And you've also done this incredible Polaroid series with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. So, I wanted to ask you—tell me, and tell our readers about this very special relationship you have with Catherine Opie, and then particularly about this Estate Project for Artists with AIDS project.

RON ATHEY Sometimes it's hard to back up to a period before [AIDS]. Well, right at that moment, there was the grief people were living with. But until then, a lot of people around me were kind of holding on, they didn't want me to get sick and die. With Catherine so inside the scene, you know, all the dykes with mustaches are my crew forever, and they've all transitioned into different people since then, but it really was this strong moment and time both in inner relations, but also in coming into the light together. It was a strong time to make a statement about who you were. And yeah, that language didn't exist. It was just sometimes fun, sometimes it was clubby. They had a biker gang called the Hell's Belles. You know, it was cheeky. By the time we got to the thirteen images that we recorded on Polaroid, we had been talking about documenting, I guess you could say, the iconic image from each performance that we both agreed upon.

So, it would be the Solar Anus, then she wanted to add a sex act, so we added a fisting one—with a little prompting to up the ante. But, to actually cull it down to one image, there was this back-and-forth prompting and deciding what it would be mixed with to create the ultimate image. Will it be the crowned look or the beads coming out of the ass? It was an amazing durational thing over two days. The last one was the really bloody Saint Sebastian. Because it would be hard to back down and do something clean after that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST And there's actually another question I had about that because when you worked on these large-scale Polaroids, you said that they were an attempt at restaging scenes from your performance history. One way of documenting performance is by photographing it or filming it. Another one is by not doing that and having it in people's memory. But the other one is by redoing it. I've been working on this project, “Do It.” I have been inviting artists to write instructions and then people can Do It, and interpret it. It’s inspired by Fluxus, but also by the autoprogettazione design of Enzo Mari, who asked how you can actually transmit knowledge through these instructions. So, I was very interested in this kind of dimension of restaging. And also, in you saying that the photos were not true to the reference. The only one that was true to the reference was Saint Sebastian. So, it’s kind of no longer a remake, but it's sort of like an essence—of Sebastian Suspended or Solar Anus. I would love to hear more about this.

RON ATHEY Well, I think if we talk about Solar Anus, I lived it as a performance when I was making it, but I felt like when it's put away, that it was an opportunity to give it another life—by refining it as a static image. So, I didn't see it as I'm in the middle of this action—it was a proper formal portrait. And also, the nature of that camera was how long we had to stay in the dark—how to have an expression in the dark and not change it when a hot flash hits your whole body. So, it took this kind of building up of how to work that hot flash coming at me. Some of the images are two different performances meshed together.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST For example, there is also “Suicide Bed.” Can you talk to me a bit about “Suicide Bed” and “St. Sebastian”?

RON ATHEY “Suicide Bed,” as I've said earlier, was the first performance experience that made me realize that a solo performance could be as, or more powerful, than a group extravaganza. For the Catherine Opie portrait, because of the shallowness of the focus of that Polaroid camera, we had to go almost vertical with the bed. So, it was almost like “Suicide Bed” suspension. It never felt like that in the performance. Also, I was being held up by the needles for much longer than I did in the performance—it didn't have the authentic melancholy that the performance did. For “St. Sebastian,” I think everything was building up in everyone by that scene, you know, it's an atrocity exhibition in a way. It's beautiful, it is poetic, but it also looked like a piece of liver on the floor from so much blood pouring off of me, and two liters of saline in the scrotum, so there’s this disfigurement. That’s another Vaginal Davis-ism, sexual repulsive.

Mat+Kat_Autre_RonAthey_Print13_Hi-Res.jpg

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I saw the great interview with you and Lydia Lunch. Generosity is a word that often comes up in relation with Lydia Lunch. And generosity is such an important word, such an important medium. It should be the medium of the 21st century. In a post-medium condition, generosity should always be the medium, in art, in curation, in museums, and I think in a way, generosity in your work is very important. It's interesting that in the press text of the show, Queer Communion explores your practice “as paradigmatic of a radically alternative mode of art-making as queer communion—the generous extension of self into the world through a mode of open embodiment that enacts creativity in the social sphere through collective engagement as art.” I wanted to ask you about generosity as your medium.

RON ATHEY Wouldn't it be better to help develop a scene that you would want to live in, or that you would want to learn from? There's an often repeated and not quite true thing that I formed a new religion after leaving religion. And I’m lucky I have Nietzsche for that. Like, yes, I do something, but I don't want to just be alone in doing it. So, you have to find the reason why you do it and nurture people around you. I think of generosity in terms of interaction with people, it's hard for me to use that word within the work itself. Because I don't know another way to approach how I work.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I wanted to ask you about censorship, and unrealized projects, because, ultimately, we know a great deal about architects’ unrealized projects because they publish them. But we know very little about artists' unrealized projects. Now the range of unrealized projects can be very wide or broad because there are projects that have been too big to be realized, too small to be realized, or maybe too expensive to be realized. Or too little time to be realized because of our lifespan. There are also forgotten projects. Then there are projects that are unrealized because of self-censorship. Your work for many years has been banned or censored by museums. Today, there is a new form of control, of censorship through social media. So, I wanted to ask you about this whole kind of idea of the unrealized project, and maybe also then in the second part of the question, self-censorship, or censorship.

RON ATHEY I was a teenager before the Meese Commission Report (Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, 1986) in the States. So, I could go to discos until six in the morning when I was fifteen. Then, there was Operation Spanner (investigation into same-sex male sadomasochism across the United Kingdom in the late 1980s) in England while there was a war on culture in the States. So, I know how different the world is on different sides of this line. And then, to think you can thrive in an underground or a counterculture that you build, and you're very happy within that. But then, the commercial world starts absorbing your culture. So even that doesn't exist. I think it's a challenge to carve out your space and also expand and not be used up. I have to be aware of that and I'm also somebody who is a bit phobic of popular culture and celebrity culture because of that. I think it cheapens everything. I have a willfully ignorant ability to stay in my lane. I certainly have a grandiosity in me, so ever since I thought operatically, to collaborate with an opera singer, there's never enough of a budget. I mean, give me a hundred thousand dollars, I’ll need two—and those are lower in budgets. So, I will go to the next way of making it. I wouldn't call those unrealized projects, but they didn't reach the potential that they could have reached. Sometimes I'll take that as a nod to work in a different way, to work in duets, or work with four people or less if it's company work, or work in a way where you invite people to perform their own work within yours, like in a happening. I did that in Naples at the Madre [Museum], which was a fantastic experience.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST So, what’s too big to be realized? An opera?

RON ATHEY Yeah. I’m trying to work on it in pieces right now, but it is the Asclepeion. And I would like to stage something in ancient ruins—something massive and multi dimensional, more immersive, and less of a show. It's more of a monster installation.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST A monster installation in ancient ruins.

RON ATHEY Yes, it could be in Africa, it could be in Greece.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I've also got a question from our mutual friend Parma Ham. Ham wants to know about rituals. And I often ask this question about rituals, because Tarkovsky said, “We're living in a time bereft of rituals.” We need to reintroduce rituals, and that's definitely something you have done for more than forty years. But his question is, what are rituals today? Queer communions?

RON ATHEY I think there's the archetype of the ritual—and it resonates through time and space, but the context or the way it looks has to change. And so, I think for myself, that's what I'm always doing—to push the body and spirit. It has to be boundary-pushing. It can't just be offering flowers to a statue.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST It has to be boundary-pushing?

RON ATHEY Yes. There has to be a sacrifice to have a ritual.

ART / FASHION/ CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM

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